Varislintu wrote:Oh yay, glad to hear it has more fans.
Have you seen both the ones with the older (Irish?) actress and the newer ones with the younger actress? I think the character of the series changed a lot as the main character changed, but I actually like both. They're different, but still both good.
I only joined when Harry and Leo were part of the team. Back in 2010, maybe? I've yet to catch up with the older episodes. I definitely was watching in 2011. Time flies so quickly.
I think I could give Scandinavian stuff more of a try -- I only really followed Bro(en) (The Bridge) closely. I do watch the occasional Beck or Wallander movie (or Maria Wern and what-nots), though. My boyfriend refers to this as me getting my fix of depressive stories.
They
are pretty bleak.
I'm not too fond of Wallander, at least the one(s) I've seen. Scandinavian stuff
is known to be bleak and depressive for a reason, but that's a nice change.
I see. I think a problem is also that the series from Germany they buy to Finland are either old or really long-running series. I guess they could try to freshen up the selection a bit.
Most of what's on TV here seems to be really long-running series, they don't have the courage to give new ideas a try. Whenever the private channels produce something, it's usually trashy, and the public channels simply keep on doing what they've done for decades. They really fail to reach younger audiences (their average is over 60), but whenever they try to reach them, the older folks cry out loud and many younger people don't even expect to find anything for them on them (if they still watch TV at all). There was a lot of talk about trying new things, "Americanising" series more (read: serial productions instead of procedurals), but I'm not sure how much they're actually working on.
Free TV really isn't what is used to be any more here, so that also affects the productions. Apart from that, Germany traditionally was more of a film or TV film than a series country, as you can still see by looking at their programming. Unlike in other countries, pay TV always struggled, too, so that's another source that doesn't produce good stuff (they've apparently produced some decent or good series recently, though). At least pay TV started making profits recently and with the big merger of the different "Skys" and a growing number of own productions, that might became a source of good productions. Actually, for series fans, free TV is just getting worse and worse, many are actually fleeing into pay TV or VOD (or piracy, of course).
I agree with you about your description, especially all this intellectual talk and the hype nowadays is unbearable. I recently read an article where experts described what we can learn about their subject through popular TV series. So people watched Breaking Bad to learn about chemistry? I doubt that. That's probably the downside of the increase in popularity of series in general and especially serials.
Another series I liked is the Flemish "Salamander". A very different crime drama compared to e.g. the dark Scandinavian ones, but good, with a lot of history in it, too. It also has both Flemish and French in it on a regular basis.