In 2013, Lauren Collins published a piece in the New Yorker called “Danish Postmodern” about the sudden blooming of British people’s love for Danish television, which then showed how the tendrils of this cultural phenomenon were also reaching into America. After the tremendous success of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Collins reported, Denmark’s public-service broadcaster DR produced the now-legendary crime dramas The Killing and The Bridge, and the political thriller Borgen. These first two were remade into inferior American adaptions, and the last was itself based on the West Wing. The early 2010s wave of great Scandinavian crime drama thus had both roots in and an effect upon the television culture of the United States.



Americans are now experiencing the second wave of this big and interesting movement in television; a wave both influenced by and more complex than the first. Netflix has acquired a number of European crime dramas—from Belgium, Iceland, and more—in what appears to be an attempt to broaden the Scandinavian noir (or Scandinoir) fanbase into something more expansive, sophisticated, and future-oriented.

The solid base of this new wave of European crime drama bought for American audiences is not Danish, but British. Right now, on Netflix, you can watch cops solve murders in almost every region of the United Kingdom. Hinterland is set in foggy Wales. Marcella, which was made by the Swedish director of The Bridge, is set in London. Happy Valley takes you to rural Yorkshire, where you may need subtitles. River is again in London, but led by the Swedish-accented megastar Stellan Skarsgård. Paranoid is set in a fictional town called Woodmere, presumably in the South somewhere. Broadchurch is set in Dorset. The Fall is in Belfast. Sadly, the remote Scottish drama Shetland is only available via Netflix UK.

That is already a lot of programming. But once a viewer is caught up in the gloomy snares of British crime TV, it is only a matter of time before they experiment with languages unknown. Consider The Break (original title, La Trêve, meaning “the truce”). The Break is a recent addition to the Netflix stable, licensed from RTBF of Belgium. It’s in French, with some strange Flemish flourishes. Our antihero is, as usual, a cop with problems. Inspector Yoann Peeters’s brow is low and his features immobile. He wears Scandinoir-style woolen sweaters, and has come in from out of town.

Like Peeters’s face, the show saves the big action for the last third of its outstanding first season. Episode 1 is slow like a village bus, with some tantalizing Nazi hints. A popular young football player has died, his body discovered in a river. From the start, Peeters (played by Yoann Blanc) seems sad and pops pills, but he never looks at himself in the mirror with self-conscious eyes or anything clichéd like that. He wears boring clothes and tries to solve the murder. He’s not a great father. Nothing dramatic.