AMC is now officially the cable network that can do no wrong.
They not only have the three best shows on TV– “Mad Men,” “Breaking Bad” and my all-time favorite monster show, “The Walking Dead” — but they’ve essentially changed the landscape of series TV.
Get ready for another earthquake.
On Sunday night, they premiere “The Killing,” a bleak, slow-moving, humorless show that is still so good that you will be angry every time an episode ends.
OK — it is a cop show. But the good thing is that, for once, it’s not a cop show. Huh?
“The Killing,” based on a hugely popular Danish series, takes place in Seattle and begins with two simultaneous stories. While Seattle detective Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos) is packing up on her last day on the job — she’s moving to California to marry her boyfriend — a young girl is being brutally killed in the woods.
It’s been Linden’s job to teach the guy who’s taking her place, Stephen Holder (Joel Kinnaman), how to work a homicide — and on the very day she’s about to bolt, a murder happens.
The body of a teen girl is found inside the car of city councilman/mayoral hopeful Darren Richmond (Billy Campbell). The girl is the daughter of Mitch and Stan Larsen (Michelle Forbes, Brent Sexton), and the credit card found at the scene belongs to her moving-man father, Stan.
Over the course of 13 episodes, that mystery and many others slowly unfold like a great, complex old-fashioned jigsaw puzzle. But unlike those annoying cardboard puzzles, this one is made of flesh-and-blood humans.
And that’s the deal — these are the most honest characters that you will see on American TV. Linden, for example, is a cop, yes, but Enos — the red-headed sister wife Kathy Marquart on the Juniper Creek compound in “Big Love” — plays her makeup and flashy-wardrobe-free.
Linden is a professional working woman — who just wants to take her son (is that really her son?) to Northern California and live a different life. But can she leave the case and the family’s heartache in the hands of Holder, a former narc who is a not-particularly-bright pot-head himself? Or is he?
Both Enos and Kinnaman play their characters in such unexpected ways that the real mystery is why they haven’t broken out before.
What is missing from “The Killing”? Everything you’ve come to know and love on a cop show. Don’t miss it.