Blog Retraction: "The Killing" Is Actually a Waste of Your Time

(All right, one of these two people killed Rosie Larsen. I just know it!)

[Ed. note: This post was written before the season finale of the show, which has since received some scathingly harsh (and justifiable) reviews, most notably here, here, here, here and here. Whatever my thoughts of the series are relates only to the show's first 12 episodes].


Take yourself back for a moment to a much more simpler time. The date was April 3rd, 2011, better known as the Sunday when The Rock hosted WrestleMania 27 to a pay-per-view audience in the hundreds of thousands. Oh, how much has time changed since then! Back then, Osama Bin Laden was still alive (assume to still be hiding in the same Afghani cave that he's been living in for years), while Harold Camping was still technically not incorrect about his 05/21 Judgment Day prediction. It was also during that time when Tupac Shakur was still pronounced alive (according to PBS), the original iPad had still yet to be considered inferior compared to the completely different and more revolutionary iPad 2, and the film adaptation of "Mr. Popper's Penguins" with Jim Carrey had yet to take a dump on the eyes, ears and mouth of the moviegoing public.

It was also during this date when AMC, a network that previously had a perfect 4-for-4, 1.000 batting average with dramas the likes of "Mad Men," "Breaking Bad," and "The Walking Dead," debuted "The Killing," a new original series based on the critically acclaimed (and BAFTA award-winning) Danish series of the same name and developed to the U.S. by former "Cold Case" producer Veena Sud, with two back-to-back episodes. A day after that season premiere, I wrote a quick, two paragraph opinion of it on the 04/04 installment of "Random Thoughts" that basically praised those first two episodes. To recap: I thought it was a fantastic premiere while also praising the show for its abandonment of the usual crime procedural cliches, their focus on the grief of Rosie Larsen's family, the good writing and the stellar acting from the cast. I also said in the very same post that I was so impressed by the show's first two episodes (still am to this day, actually) that I just couldn't wait to see how the rest of the season played out.

Now, with 12 episodes down and the season finale scheduled to air in mere hours (10 p.m./EDT to be exact) I would just like to say...boy, how times have changed!

See, it's not that I currently despise "The Killing" so much as I have become incredibly and utterly disappointed by it. What started out as a crime procedural with an interesting concept (see a crime that would've been solved on network TV in 40 minutes extended into 13 episodes, showing the impact of it throughout the lives of the friends and family of the deceased person) has turned itself into a show that is just as cliched as the network TV shows it was trying to separate itself from, complete with one bogus red herring after another that at times made it seemed that the show forgot what it was trying to accomplish in the first place (which was finding the killer for teenager Rosie Larsen). Basically, it has become a body without a soul, or a show that has pieces in place to make it great but just never seemed to put it all together and make it into one beautiful, fun-to-watch whole, whether it was because of bad writing, poor creative decision and...well, yeah, that's pretty much it.

How did my drastic change of opinion change? Well, for the first four or five episodes in I actually still found myself liking this show, wanting to tune in week-to-week to see what would happen next like the lady who wrote this New York Post review of the show (one that AMC constantly used to promote the show during most of its season one run and seems pretty bad in retrospect) said I would. Yes, it was there were still some things that the show needed to fix, but I forgave them for being so early into the series and for my previous brand loyalty to AMC. But then came the beginning of the Bennett Ahmed arc, and that was the moment where I believe that the show began its downward plunge into mediocrity, one where its early mistakes never became fixed and the product worsened. For those of you that haven't watched the show, the Bennett Ahmed arc saw the investigators of the murder of Rosie Larsen (Detective Sarah Linden, played by future Emmy-nominee Mireille Enos, and Stephen Holder, played by Joel Kinnaman) investigate Ahmed, who was Larsen's literature teacher prior to her death, for six episodes only to find that Ahmed has nothing to do with the murders but was instead just hiding some 12 year old Somalian girl in order to protect her from some forced marriage or something. In the process of that investigation, we saw a youth-organization get cut-off of Seattle city funds unnecessarily because it was associated with Ahmed, anti-Muslim hate among the city's racists (capped off by the hilarious scene where a mosque was graffitied with messages like "Kill Muslims" as they were written by middle schoolers), and Ahmed eventually critically wounded by Stan Larsen (Brent Sexton), the ticked-off father of Rosie with a mob-related past, and co-worker Belko Royce (Brad Sexton III). Now, the reason why I just described the basic plot to a story that took over six episodes to solve was simple: it ended up having zero help, I repeat ZERO HELP, to with finding out who Rosie was killed by! Instead it just ended up being six episodes that Veena Sud and company used to stall for the final four (which was when the investigators finally started to get really close into solving the murder). In other words, you could have watched episode four, skipped the next six, and come right back to watch episode ten without missing a thing! It actually made me regret spending hours watching TV in primetime, and that's usually something that I don't often do.

But my hatred for "The Killing" goes way beyond the main plot of those six episodes and its really bad writing. No, it goes much beyond that.

For instance, let's talk about the crap-tastic police work, shall we? Now, while I am for having police detectives on TV who aren't super geniuses but rather imperfect, believable human beings (which is what the main character, Sarah Linden, is supposed to be on the show), it doesn't mean that those same police officers should also be incompetent in their job. Take Detective Bunk Moreland in "The Wire" as an example. He's not a mega genius in crime solving as other TV characters like Patrick Jane in "The Mentalist" or Dr. Cal Lightman in "Lie to Me" are, but rather an often down on his luck regular detective who even admitted in season three of the show that if there's ever a man that would want to take his life, it would be him. And yet, despite all that he's still a very respectable detective who, through hard work and dedication towards policework, does his job well enough to help solve the investigations assigned to him (such as the 14 Jane Doe murders in season two) and arrest a few bad guys in the process.

But with Linden, and really the entire Seattle police department staff assigned to solve Rosie Larsen's murder, it's a whole other story, one that has featured glaring investigative oversights and breaks in the case that really only seem to come through some lucky breaks. Take the most recent episode, "Beau Soleil," for instance, where they finally decided to manually check every single link of the murder victim ever of Rosie. Now, this would be considered smart police work in my opinion...except if it didn't take 11 days after the start of the murder investigation for that to happen. Need another example of the incompetency of the police work? Well, how about how it took them nearly 10 weeks to realize that Rosie's keychain with an ambiguous name could possibly lead to the name of an individual or organization that could potentially be connected to her death, or how the police never made a statement or comment to a press that Bennett Ahmed was not accused of murdering Rosie so as to not have the anti-Muslim rage among some of the city's residents or Stan Larsen's quest of vengeance to continue forward, or not interrogating Rosie's aunt hard enough earlier in the season so that she would've given the information on Rosie's escort service career sooner than last week. And the only times that there were any progress were after some coincidences like Linden jogging to the location with the name similar to that on Rosie's keychain. This poor investigating might have been okay with me had in been on a show like "CSI" because they have 40 minutes to solve a murder, but when it's a show like "The Killing" that has their murder investigation stretched to around 500 minutes (give or take) you need to make the whole thing believable and logical. That, sad as it is to say, did not happen in season one.

(And, please, don't argue that this is because of Linden dealing with their complicated personal life, like the relationship with her son Jack or the situation with her and her Sonoma fiance. If this were the case than Linden would not have agreed to be assign to investigate the case in the first place)

Another main criticism that you can add to the first season of "The Killing" lies in its poor characterization. Outside of Holder (and perhaps Stan Larsen in the last episode) there has really never really been a single character on the show that I have either liked or cared for. Linden has become either annoying or frustrating to watch, the constant grief of Mitch Larsen has become nothing short of tiresome by episode nine, Rosie's brothers have become almost non-existent to actually know if I should hate them or not, and I could care less about anyone in the Darren Richmond campaign (which I suppose is a good thing if one of the three turn out to be Rosie's killers, because that way I wouldn't feel a thing once they go into prison for life). Even Rosie Larsen, the girl whose death is supposed to be the center focus of these 13 episodes, was pushed aside as a character to the point that you would often forget about her existence if it weren't for the show airing newest developments in the life of her family. This could be okay for maybe one or two episodes but not for 75% of the season!

The reason why I bring this up is simple: in a show where there is a deliberately slow pace like "The Killing," the show's writers are supposed to give us characters that we're supposed to have some care or deep investment over so as to make up for the fact that most of the show is filled with nothing but filler and that there is nothing happening of major notes towards the overall plot. A good example of this would be another AMC show that aired during this past TV season, "Rubicon," the low rated conspiracy thriller drama that was cancelled back in October two weeks after their only season finale. This was a show that had a pace far, far more slower than "The Killing" (the main reason why it got cancelled in the first place) yet greatly made up for it with characters (ranging from main character Will Travers to badass gay API supervisor Kale Ingram) that were so compelling it made you want to continue watching it week-to-week just to see them go about their daily lives episode after episode. With "The Killing," on the other hand, I get none of that feeling. This very handicap of the show is what would end up posing problems for it later on in the season as there were certain scenes (like Councilman Richmond throwing the unintentionally hilarious $5 million dollar basketball shot) where the show asked viewers such as myself to hold their collective breaths in anticipation and wait to see what happened next to those characters, yet ended up only doing the exact opposite. And even when the show's writers actually tried to deliberately make the viewers care for the their two main characters (Linden and Holder) in the episode "Missing" (the show's answer to Mad Men's "The Suitacse" and to Breaking Bad's "Fly"), that also didn't end up working because it was simply a case of too-little, too-late, or the writers planting this episode at a time in the season where it just didn't fit the overall narrative.

And finally, there's the red herrings. Oh, how they've become the bane to me enjoying the show! You would figure that the show about a murdered teenager would involve spending one episode after another into the life of that murdered teenager, who was killed despite being apparently kind and likeable. Well, no...it did not happen that way. Instead, what season one of "The Killing" ultimately became was a show whose main goal was basically to spend one episode after the next focusing its attention on one suspect after another, whether it was Rosie's friend Sterling to Ahmed, and then find ways to make them innocent only to never hear from them or have the show pay attention to them again. Not only that, but they decided to completely abandon an opportunity to examine Rosie's personal life (her friends, her hobbies, etc.) to do so. And the worst part of the whole thing was that each red herring became more pointless and wackier than the last (which is what sucks about season two once again having 13 episodes, because it will most likely be just another continuation of this annoying trend). Sometimes, I just wished that they would have revealed the killer to the audience much sooner (like in season one of "Dexter," for instance) so I could've just stopped seeing the show's writers continue to figuratively blue-ball the viewer and instead spend the next few episodes seeing how the police finally found out what we realized a while back, giving us the added enjoyment of feeling smarter of the entire situation.

Maybe this was just be a one season thing. Maybe by the time that this show comes back next spring (AMC renewed the show this past Tuesday), Suds and the writing staff will have realized the mistakes that they made this season, work out the kinks and deliver the show that is a much more different, much more interesting set of episodes. Maybe the "Who killed Rosie Larsen?" story will be solved tonight, giving way to a new season-long story arch that offers the viewers with more than one of two interesting characters, acceptable and comprehensive police work, and less episodes written as something other than works of pure stalling purposes. Maybe...but that's what I have been hoping for while watching other mediocre to slightly above average dramas like "Dexter" and "House," and those have yet to happen (and probably never will). Besides, considering how bad dramas usually don't tend to get better overtime (especially when it's run by someone whose previous body of work included producing a mediocre CBS crime-drama), I have a good feeling that these hopes will not come to fruition.

For those of you that have enjoyed this show regularly from week-to-week, I offer you my deepest congrats. I honestly do. The fact that you didn't find this series a waste of time and investment like myself actually makes we want to envy you the same way I envy children who still innocently and truly believe that Santa Clause is real. Alas, barring some ultra-incredible finale tonight that makes me want to completely forgive eight out of the past nine episodes, it appears that my final thoughts of the season will resemble the city of Seattle throughout the entire run of the show: gloomy, and without any hope of some sunshine (a.k.a. any positive feelings towards it).

Sincerely,
Your pal: mj15

UPDATE (06/20): Just finished watching the season finale. Veena Sud could punch herself in the crotch for all I care. What an awful, piece of crap ending! Oh, and considering Sud's interview with Alan Sepinwall, her arrogance makes me sure that none of the episodic (and seasonal) mistakes will get fixed at any point, in which case (barring some raving reviews about how much it has improved overtime) you can officially add me onto the list of those not sticking around for next spring.

If you have any opinions on today's post, or if you just have any suggestions or
tips for my next blog entry, e-mail me at: mj1599@aol.com. Your e-mails are greatly appreciated.