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I gave the first two seasons of AMC's The Killing a real shot, because I found the weird, winding Rosie Larsen plot intriguing, and the political sub-text even more so, taking in as it did the extremely strange and powerful influence exercised by Native American casinos -- Hi, Jack Abramoff! -- over local governments. I didn't even mind that it was always raining outside and, apparently, that it was always raining behind Mireille Enos's eyes, too. But what kept me coming back was Joel Kinnaman's Detective Stephen Holder, who I think is probably my favorite character in all of television right now.

Holder is a recovering junkie who still talks like he's wired on some private stash or another. Almost everything Kinnaman does with the character is sly, and little bit off plumb and, without him, Enos's Linden might long ago simply gloomed herself into a puddle on the Seattle sidewalk. This year, with a plot that winds through the subterranean world of lost and broken children living on the streets of Seattle, Holder's found the perfect milieu for the odd combination of empathetic weirdo and supercop that Kinnaman's made of him, and the show is turning almost weekly into a star turn.(James Wolcott thinks the overall look of the show this year owes something to the best of Michael Mann's work, and Wolcott's dead on. There's rain-smeared light everywhere.) The new storyline is light-years beyond the old -- and Peter Sarsgaard, as a death-row inmate with secrets of his own, is putting up trophy-caliber work himself -- and Holder is the unquestioned center of the show, his volatile relationship with a teenage runaway named Bullet giving Kinnaman a chance to work out his slangy interrogation technique while pretending he doesn't care about her. There are noisier characters on TV, and smarter ones, and stranger ones, but there are very few as completely unique. All his edges are hidden but, somewhere, they gleam.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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