Fans of Saga Noren and dark crime dramas will be cheered by new series of Swedish-Danish show in BBC4 Saturday night slot

Borgen came to the end of its run last month and neither it nor The Killing will return, but fans of Scandinavian drama can console themselves that The Bridge will be back on BBC4 on Saturday with a third series already in the pipeline.

The acclaimed thriller, which began with the discovery of a body in the middle of the Oresund Bridge connecting Denmark and Sweden, returns to the spectacular crossing for the beginning of series two.

Set 13 months later, the events of the first series, which ended in fury, grief, betrayal and a gut-wrenching final twist, are not left entirely behind.

Its star Sofia Helin, who plays straight-talking Malmo murder detective Saga Noren, said: "I was annoyed because the ending was so dark, I thought no one will want to see the second season. I was so upset." She need not have worried. The Swedish-Danish co-production has proved hugely influential and will return for a third series.

Sold to more than 130 countries, it was remade in the US and adapted by Broadchurch producer Kudos, in a rare UK-French co-production, as The Tunnel, which came to an end last month, after general acclaim, on Sky Atlantic.

All three Scandinavian dramas have one thing in common – strong female lead characters – which led actor Anna Chancellor, who starred in BBC2's The Hour, to complain that UK commissioning editors had not followed their lead.

Helin said she hoped her role and the success of the drama could set a positive example for others. "If you are not a feminist, you are stupid," she said.

While Helin's character appeared to show aspects of Asperger syndrome in the first series, it was never made explicit. The second season, which reunites Noren with Copenhagen detective Martin Rohde, played by Kim Bodnia, returns to the topic. "To begin with it was very hard because she is so different from me," said Helin. "I enjoyed being her but she is a very lonely person. The obvious choice would have been to try to make her hard or cold, but to me that wasn't interesting. It was interesting to see her struggling with her difficulties and her way of being, how she related to situations and people around her."

She added: "I could sense when I read the script that she was different, that she didn't have so much empathy, and I started to study Asperger's and to try to behave the way I thought an Asperger's person would behave."

The show's haunting theme tune is back, as is its sense of humour, much of it generated by the "odd couple" relationship between the mismatched detectives.

But such was the devastating climax to the original series that even the most mundane of events, such as a schoolboy having his mobile phone stolen in the first episode, engenders a sense of dread.

Nearly 1.1 million viewers watched the opening episode of the first series on BBC4, ahead of the launch episodes of either The Killing or Borgen, the political drama which returned with 752,000 viewers last month.

Fans of the show can be reassured that there will also be a third series of The Bridge, Helin confirmed. "It was so much fun to do Saga again, to find out what she has been through and what she is like when you put here in different situations," she said.

"We had Borgen and The Killing before, so people wanted more of our stories. They wanted more than a normal crime series, something more visual and darker."

Saturday has become BBC4's night for subtitled drama and, like its predecessors, The Bridge will be broadcast two episodes at a time over the next five weekends.

The channel will look beyond Scandinavia to fill the slot in coming months, including Israeli drama Hostages, a 10-part thriller about the family of a surgeon who are taken hostage in order to coerce her into killing the prime minister on the operating table. Channel 4 has already bought the US remake of the drama and is also expected to broadcast it on a Saturday night, where it enjoyed critical acclaim with its own overseas drama, French thriller Les Revenants.

But BBC4 will not leave Denmark behind, with 19th century drama 1864, the first period offering from Danish public service broadcaster DR, which made Borgen, The Killing and The Bridge (along with Sweden's SVT).