THE KILLING, Ep. 3

On balance, this show continues to impress, but as with so much that is impressive on balance, there's some unevenness.

First the bad news. Sometimes, just as I'm getting caught up in the murder mystery and police procedural aspect, I'll have a kind of hypnic jerk reflex that pulls me out of the story, where I realize how Law & Order/CSI it is. And I like those shows, but I guess I'm expecting more from this. It's early, so who knows?--there may be developments to come that will knock me on my ass. But so far, that aspect of the show is really no great shakes.

Now for the good news. It's a cliche to say that a quality cable show is "not about" the zombies spaceships island mythology genre elements so much as it's about the characters, but solid character work is worth noting, and when it overshadows more weakly realized genre elements, that should be noted, too. This show delivers a lot of outstanding character moments, and they're the main reason I haven't written it off yet. Most are as muted as the frosty shades of gray and blue that dominate the color palette--which has the unfortunate effect of making others seem more on-the-nose than they actually are. Alan Sepinwall mentions "a great (albeit devastating) moment like one of the sons reassuring Stan 'We don't have to talk about it,'" but one of the commenters dissents, "This was great?? I thought it was hokey and completely ruined the scene. It could have gone without saying." I wasn't quite as taken with that moment as Sepinwall was, but I did find it affecting, and think the commenter's dismissal of it as "hokey" is pretty churlish. The other moment Sepinwall singles out, Mitch's experiment with drowning in the bathtub, was the one that really stunned me. As he puts it, "In the state she's in, Mitch could be genuinely suicidal in an attempt to shut off her overwhelming grief, or she might just be trying to understand what it was Rosie felt in her final moments." It was a harrowing scene, gorgeously shot.

Much of the show is gorgeously shot, though, which is the other good news. Several times an episode, I just get lost in the visual experience. I wish I had a bigger screen and HD AMC. Whether we're looking through a rain-spattered window into the golden glow of a kitchen, or bright gray light through huge rain-spattered windows reduces a politician standing in front of them almost to a silhouette, it's simply beautiful.

I wouldn't say I'm hooked, but I will tune in next week.