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HIGHLIGHTS THE BRIDGE: SEASON 4 BBC Two, Fri, 9pm; DVD / Blu-ray, Mon 2 Jul See interview, left.
AFRICA: A JOURNEY INTO MUSIC BBC Four, Fri 1 Jun, 10pm Rita Ray explores the roots and influence of African music in this new three-part music doc. MARVEL'S CLOAK & DAGGER Amazon Prime, Fri 8 Jun Yet another Marvel TV series, this time focussing on two very different teenagers struggling with newly acquired superpowers.
SENSE8 Netflix, Fri 8 Jun The Wachowskis' action series about eight people sharing a telepathic link won't be back for a full run but bows out with this two-hour special.
POLDARK – SEASON 4 BBC One, Sun 10 Jun, 9pm Cornish set period drama with Aidan Turner and Eleanor Tomlinson. ATLANTA: SEASON 2 FOX (UK), Sun 17 Jun, 10pm See review, page 118.
LUKE CAGE: SEASON 2 Netflix, Fri 22 Jun More Marvel action as the hero with the unbreakable skin returns. John McIver plays new villain Bushmaster. SHARP OBJECTS Sky Atlantic, July (date tbc) A journalist (Amy Adams) reluctantly returns to her home town to investigate a series of child murders.
HARROW Alibi, Jul (date tbc) Ioan Gruffudd plays a brilliant but unconventional forensic pathologist who takes on the cases others can't crack. DISENCHANTMENT Netflix, Fri 17 Aug Brand new animated series from the mind of Matt Groening, set in a fantasy realm and aimed at an older audience than The Simpsons.
STRANGE BRIGADE PC / PS4 / Xbox One (Rebellion), Tue 28 Aug Co-operative third person shooter with a mix of exploration, tomb raiding, survival horror and steam punk.
TOM CLANCY'S JACK RYAN Amazon Prime, Fri 31 Aug John Krasinski is the latest actor to take on the role of CIA analyst Jack Ryan (previously played by Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck and Chris Pine).
1 Feb–31 Mar 2018 THE LIST 119 1 Jun–31 Aug 2018 THE LIST 119
CROSSING THE LINE
As brilliant Scandi noir The Bridge approaches its grand fi nale, Brian Donaldson talks to the series creator Hans Rosenfeldt about showing brutal murders and writing damaged characters
‘W ith that i rst scene we could never ever have stones actually hitting full in the face from the front, that’s just impossible to do. So we backed off a little from it; we saw the head twist back and did a lot with music and sound effects.’ TV writer and crime novelist Hans Rosenfeldt is talking about the appalling scene which opened the fourth and i nal series of The Bridge when the general director of Copenhagen’s Migration Agency is about to meet her end through a horrendous stoning.
This jaw dropping beginning was just one of many violent moments across 38 episodes of a show which was as dark as it was compelling. ‘We want something to feel brutal, but never to have a shock effect purely for its own sake,’ insists Rosenfeldt, one member of a writing team for the show which he created back in 2011. ‘There are a lot of scenes on paper that are really disturbing but they’re not over the border of what we can do. And in editing we can choose: “do we need this or should we take it away”?’
Rosenfeldt is rightly proud of the show’s success, but he never dreamed that it would take off in the way it did with viewers outside of Sweden and Denmark (each series had storylines that brought the police forces of both countries together). The three cross-border remakes with cases traversing Russia and Estonia, the US and Mexico, and UK with France (The Tunnel) held no real appeal to him though (neither presumably will the further two versions in the pipeline for Germany-Austria and Malaysia-Singapore). ‘I watched a few episodes, but couldn’t really enjoy them as a TV series. I job-watched them: “oh, they kept this, they changed that; oh, that’s what they did there”. It didn’t give me any pleasure as a viewer so I stopped.’ Much of The Bridge audience’s pleasure arrived through the interactions between autistic and talented detective Saga Norén (Soi a Helin) and her work colleagues, particularly the main sidekicks. She eventually helped put Martin Rohde (Kim Bodnia) behind bars at the end of series two after he gained vengeance on his son’s killer, before developing a no-ties sexual relationship with Henrik Sabroe (Thure Lindhardt), a man tortured by the disappearance of his wife and two daughters several years before we i rst meet him in season three.
Plenty has been written and spoken, justii ably so, of the sensitive portrayal of Saga, but the forcible detail which went into writing other fully-rounded characters in the show should not be overlooked. ‘Henrik is very likeable and a little bit more sad than Martin was,’ states Rosenfeldt. ‘We didn’t replace Martin with just another Martin, we replaced him with someone who was equally or even more damaged than Saga is. Saga and Henrik needed each other very much and that’s a good thing to play off.’ Although Rosenfeldt had a lot of fun working on a show which took up a substantial chunk of the last decade, he is convinced that ending The Bridge on a high was the correct decision. ‘We were on public service channels and it’s their duty to keep coming up with new stuff, new writers and new shows,’ he notes. ‘But it wasn’t the broadcaster saying that this is the end, it was us saying it. We don’t know too many shows that creatively peak at season six or seven, and we wanted to stop before people said “oh yeah, that used to be good”.’
The Bridge season 4 and seasons 1–4 box sets are released on DVD and Blu-ray by Arrow TV on Mon 2 Jul.