Image via Complex Original
Sunday night, AMC aired the season finale of The Killing, the network's murder mystery about a pair of Seattle detectives trying to find the villain responsible for the drowning death of a teenage girl, Rosie Larsen. After many twists and turns, the show's killer was revealed to be...the creators, who took a very promising idea (which they got from the original Danish series it was based on) and transformed it into a remarkably underwhelming show. At this point, we're not very enthused that AMC has renewed the show for a second season, but since it is going to return, we hope the show runners can learn from their mistakes. In the hope that we might help them get it right, here are seven ways AMC can improve The Killing.
Lead
Sunday night, AMC aired the season finale of The Killing, the network's murder mystery about a pair of Seattle detectives trying to find the villain responsible for the drowning death of a teenage girl, Rosie Larsen. After many twists and turns, the show's killer was revealed to be...the creators, who took a very promising idea (which they got from the original Danish series it was based on) and transformed it into a remarkably underwhelming show. At this point, we're not very enthused that AMC has renewed the show for a second season, but since it is going to return, we hope the show runners can learn from their mistakes. In the hope that we might help them get it right, here are seven ways AMC can improve The Killing.
The Victim
7. Treat the victim better than dead meat.
The advertising campaign for The Killing showed a bright faced young girl and asked, “Who killed Rosie Larsen?” Our question to the creators: “Who is Rosie Larsen and why should anyone care that she’s dead?” In 13 episodes, police investigation and a few scenes with her grieving family have revealed very little about the victim—she was well-liked, mature beyond her years…and might have been selling her little underage body on the low (for reasons unknown).
As viewers, our connection to and investment in Rosie was based largely on the emotional outpouring of her mourning family members. When they turned sour and started looking suspicious—as every damn character on the show did—we felt less sad for them and stopped caring about her, especially when she was reduced to the ill explored "dead hooker" role. If we knew more about her, good or bad, we might actually feel for her and care more about whoever snuffed her out being brought to justice.
Rehashing Developments
6. Develop characters, don’t rehash their issues.
Rosie is the least well-known character on The Killing, but none of the central players were developed much either, making it equally impossible to feel invested in them. Each could be boiled down to a single secret: Det. Sarah Linden (above) is slavishly devoted to murder victims at the expense of her son, fiancé, and ex-husband; Det. Stephen Holder is a recovering meth junkie; Stan Larsen once worked as a thug for the mob; his employee Belko envied the Larsen family because his home life, with an embarrassing, overtly sexual mom, was dysfunctional.
Rather than develop these bits of character, the show simply restated them over and over again. Linden misses yet another flight to meet her fiancé in Sonoma and start a new life. Her son is distant and screwing up in school. Her ex shows up to reiterate that she was always half-involved in her personal relationships. We get it—she’s an awful mom and wife. Is there nothing more?
If we’re not going to know the victim well, we should certainly be better acquainted with the people the story does focus on without time being wasted showing us what we already know.
Know Your Killer
5. Know who the damn killer is!
During interviews, executive producer and writer of The Killing Veena Sud revealed that she and the rest of the writing staff did not establish who Rosie Larsen’s killer was from the beginning. Instead, they identified several people who could potentially be the murderer and let their individual stories develop until one of them stood out.
When viewers of a television murder mystery don’t figure out whodunit until the final episode it’s ideal, but when creators of a television murder mystery don’t identify their killer in the entire first fucking season they’re just choking the life out of the show. (Seriously, after 13 episodes we still don’t know who killed Rosie?! FOH. Sud claims that the creators singled someone out halfway into the season, but we’re skeptical.)
Plotting things out episode to episode and wandering around from suspect to suspect is bad for two reasons: one, it gives the show an aimless feeling, and two, the actors’ performances suffer when they’re not entrusted with all their characters’ history and motivations to build their psyche. Even before Brandon Jay McLaren, who played schoolteacher Bennet Ahmed, told us that he didn’t know his character’s secret until five episodes in, the most amateur of sleuths could tell that the writing was episodic because absolutely none of the sketchiness that surfaced in later episodes registered in the slightest early on in his portrayal. If the actor playing your killer (whoever the hell that might be) knows what he or she is hiding, you’ll get something much more interesting out of them.
Red Herrings
4. Limit the red herrings.
If The Killing is to be believed, every day in Seattle is rainy and gloomy, and every inhabitant of the city is capable of brutally murdering a high school girl. One of the show’s bigger failings is that, in pursuit of a good whodunit, it paints every character as sinister. On the show’s website, there is a “Suspect Tracker,” where fans can guess who the killer is; there are a whopping 26 people to choose from.
Many of these shady characters were investigated in depth, over the course of several episodes: Kris (pictured above) and Jasper, high school punks who liked to videotape themselves double teaming girls in the school basement; Lyndon, the creepy janitor who liked to watch Kris and Jasper humiliate girls through a peephole; Bennet Ahmed, Rosie’s Muslim English teacher with a taste for young women; Belko Royce, Stan Larsen’s envious employee who had a crush/obsession with Rosie; Darren Richmond, a mayoral candidate whose campaign vehicle was used in the murder.
Obviously, there have to be a few twists and turns in a 13-episode season, but the show repeatedly misled viewers, investigating leads as the creators tried to decide who the killer should be (see #5) only to determine someone’s innocence and discard them. Conversely, the show screwed up by closely following Darren Richmond’s political campaign even after he had been cleared, making it glaringly obvious that he or one of his aids was ultimately going to be involved. The mystery could and should be much tighter by focusing the investigation on fewer suspects and not removing them from the picture as signs stop pointing to them. That’s assuming that, after a season without payoff, anyone is still watching to give a shit.
Wigger Accent
3. Chill out with the "wigger" schtick yo!
The most compelling character on season one of The Killing was Det. Stephen Holder, a rookie homicide investigator and shady, meth-addicted former vice cop played by Swede Joel Kinnaman. An extremely compelling and dark lead character (he once stole from his nephew to get a fix…and then he framed Darren Richmond for Rosie’s murder in the finale), his twisted sense of humor and street savvy from years working undercover in Seattle’s underbelly carried the detective partnership that was weighed down by Det. Sarah Linden’s more annoying failings as a wife and mother.
Unfortunately, this standout character also makes us want to bussacapinthatassyo 'cause he often speaks with an exaggerated "urban" (read: "wigger") accent that instantly calls to mind Drexl Spivey, Gary Oldman’s dreadlocked pimp character from True Romance. It completely took us out of otherwise compelling moments, so next time somebody writes his dialogue like he's a working class version of Malibu's Most Wanted, full of that cringe-inducing yiggety-yo-yo flava, somebody needs to apply some Wite-Out to the script.
Actual Police Work
2. Do some actual police work.
After watching police procedurals for years, the viewing public could probably solve a real crime, by the book, if pressed into service. So why is it then that the cops on The Killing are so incredibly incompetent? Sure, they’ve tracked down a lead or two and gotten some truth out of interrogations, but they’ve also accidentally exposed the parents of the murder victim to gruesome crime photos (photos which Det. Sarah Linden then allowed her son to leak to the Internet) and leaked suspects to the parents as well, setting up father Stan Larsen’s vigilante revenge assault on Bennet Ahmed.
Worst of all, though, is that, without any real deduction or investigative skill (or even, as has been noted elsewhere, use of the Internet for research purposes), the homicide detectives repeatedly stumble upon clues that further the plot. Stan Larsen’s employee Belko Royce keeps a shrine to Rosie in plain view on his ceiling? Curious. Linden randomly jogs past a sign that solved the mystery of “ADELA”? Odd. Linden happens to be in mayoral candidate Darren Richmond’s bachelor pad to hear his loud-ass Bockmail inbox alerts, which signal that he is Orpheus, a morbid and physically aggressive client of an escort service, and may have taken Rosie out on the night she was killed? Fuck. Outta. Here.
Sorry, but we’ve been watching procedural mysteries for years now, and such lucky discoveries don’t work unless the show is built around a psychic. Next time, the creators should come up with a mystery and then build some logical ways for hardworking detectives to solve it by, you know, doing their jobs.
Reality
1. Get real.
For a show that is seeking the truth, there is an awful lot in The Killing that does not ring true. In the end, Linden, who supposedly possesses a keen intellect, completely misses that her meth addict partner, who’s been trying to shed her all along, has been working against the case. To his dis-credit, Holder seems to think that he and whoever he’s in cahoots with (we’re guessing incumbent mayor Lesley Adams, who had a skull discovered on his waterfront build site and needs Richmond out of the picture) seem to think they’ve gotten away with murder, as though the photos Holder used to frame the candidate would not be proven illegitimate and heat would not come down on him.
With regards to Richmond’s sexual indiscretions with prostitutes, why would Adams (above), who displayed no crisis of conscience in smearing his opponent previously, wait so long to leak photos of him with hookers? Wouldn’t that, combined with ties to supposed murderer and terrorist teacher Bennet Ahmed, have been effective in burying Richmond from the jump?
A smaller, but no less ridiculous, instance occurred in the finale, when Ahmed’s pregnant wife does not recognize Stan Larsen, the man who beat her husband into a coma and turned himself in to the police, when they run into each other in the hospital. She didn’t see him on TV or in the newspapers after Rosie’s murder or the assault? How could she possibly not know his face?! Sigh.
We can accept that entertainment does not have to color within the lines, but when a show poses itself as a realistic, gritty depiction of a homicide investigation, it undermines itself by building on so much illogical nonsense. And the truth of the matter is that if the creators keep up like this, nobody will be watching the show by the end of next season.