{"id":358052,"date":"2026-03-25T22:48:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-25T22:48:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/358052\/"},"modified":"2026-03-25T22:48:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T22:48:08","slug":"netflixs-moody-mid-tier-jo-nesbo-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/358052\/","title":{"rendered":"Netflix’s Moody, Mid-Tier Jo Nesbo Series"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWho\u2019s ready for a dark odyssey into the murky recesses of Harry Hole<\/a>?<\/p>\n

\n\tStop it.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tDetective Hole\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n

\tWell-acted and atmospheric, but too convoluted.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tAirdate: Thursday, March 26 (Netflix)
Cast: Tobias Santelmann, Joel Kinnaman, Pia Tjelta, Ellen Helinder, Anders Baasmo, Maxime Baune Bochud
Creator: Jo Nesbo\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tStop giggling.<\/p>\n

\n\tBe a grownup.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs millions of Scandinavians, millions of fans of Scandinavian crime fiction, and at least 17 fans of the Michael Fassbender film The Snowman<\/a> already know, of course, the glum antihero at the center of Jo Nesbo<\/a>\u2018s Norwegian novels pronounces his name, \u201cHAR-ee Hoo-leh.\u201d Which won\u2019t stop anybody from pointing and laughing every time the detective phones somebody and their caller ID reads, \u201cHARRY HOLE.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWe are, after all, only human.<\/p>\n

\n\tSpeaking of phonetics, Detective Hole<\/a>, a nine-episode adaptation of Nesbo\u2019s The Devil\u2019s Star, is set to air on Netflix, which seems in this instance like it should be pronounced \u201cAma-zon.\u201d Sure, it\u2019s a Netflix show, but the place Detective Hole would be most at home is alongside Scarpetta<\/a> and Bosch and Cross<\/a> on Amazon, the semi-official home of handsomely produced grimdark procedural adaptations in which grumpy, traumatized investigators ignore their colleagues and generally acceptable law enforcement ethics to stop enigmatic serial killers before the latter find their next invariably female victim. Detective Hole is so thoroughly an Amazon-branded show that its pilot concludes with a \u201cThis season on Detective Hole\u2026\u201d teaser montage, something Amazon does often and Netflix does rarely.<\/p>\n

\n\tOf course, if Detective Hole were on Amazon, it would have to be called Hole, which would confuse devotees of the Josh Brolin drama Outer Range<\/a>, so it\u2019s probably just as well that Netflix stepped up to fill this hole in the marketplace.<\/p>\n

\n\tAdapted by Nesbo from his fifth Harry Hole mystery (The Snowman was the seventh), Detective Hole is padded by several episodes, and the finale arrives at a conclusion that is somewhere between illogical and wholly ludicrous. But along the way it has many things going for it, including a brooding central turn from Tobias Santelmann, an amply menacing heel turn from the ubiquitous Joel Kinnaman<\/a>, and evocative filming in and around Oslo.<\/p>\n

\n\tLook up \u201ctormented detective\u201d in a Norwegian dictionary and you\u2019ll probably find a picture of Harry Hole (Santelmann). We meet the hard-drinking Hole \u2014 whom I\u2019m going to call \u201cHarry\u201d henceforth because it feels like the lesser of two giggles \u2014 as he\u2019s drinking and investigating a bank robbery that ended in a gory homicide. That makes it bad timing for Harry to have to rush into a car chase after a potential suspect, a pursuit that concludes in a crash and the death of Harry\u2019s partner.<\/p>\n

\n\tFive years later, Harry is still obsessed with the unsolved murder from the bank, but otherwise he\u2019s doing pretty well. He has an impressively tolerant girlfriend (Pia Tjelta\u2019s Rakel), whose son (Maxime Baune Bochud\u2019s Oleg) is finally beginning to warm to him. He\u2019s getting along productively with his partner (Ingrid Bolso Berdal\u2019s Ellen) and while he isn\u2019t a fan of authority, his clearance rate is high enough that he\u2019s given a lot of latitude (as if killing your partner, however accidentally, and still keeping your job isn\u2019t a ton of latitude already). He\u2019s even quit drinking, though he carries a flask to remind himself of temptation.<\/p>\n

\n\tWith Harry, a personal spiral is only one case away, and as the series begins, there are several percolating catastrophes that might be ready to dovetail in self-destruction. Somebody seems to be conspiring to arm Oslo\u2019s two rival gangs, a looming civil war that the city\u2019s police \u2014 most prohibited from carrying guns \u2014 will be unable to stop. Meanwhile, a series of murders and missing persons cases are beginning to look like the work of a single Bible-loving perpetrator, somebody adept at removing digits and leaving clues that seem to point to a serial killer.<\/p>\n

\n\tMight one of these cases, or possibly both, be related to Harry\u2019s Swedish-born colleague Tom Waaler (Kinnaman), who is definitely corrupt and possibly (definitely) sociopathic? It\u2019s not a spoiler to say that the answer is, \u201cYup.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tNesbo wrote the entire series and, accompanied by directors Oystein Karlsen and Anna Zackrisson, he establishes an exceptional sense of creepy, nihilistic doom as Harry\u2019s precarious equilibrium is put in immediate jeopardy. Soon, drinking and rampant rule-breaking ensue.<\/p>\n

\n\tAt least Detective Hole offers a few moments of levity, or at least borderline normalcy, in its pilot, something that cannot be said about Tomas Alfredson\u2019s disastrous adaptation of The Snowman, a movie I think works really well for 45 minutes of set-up, but then goes horribly off-the-rails for the rest.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut don\u2019t expect much brightness from Detective Hole \u2014 not from Nesbo\u2019s storytelling, which fixates on violence, particularly sexual violence, with an obsession that borders on distressing. There\u2019s little brightness to Ronald Plante\u2019s cinematography either, concentrating as it does on Oslo\u2019s darkest corners, offering a city populated primarily by addicts, sex workers and the unhoused \u2014 except for when it\u2019s concentrating on breathtaking vistas and nighttime scenes in which filtered lights give the gloom a yellow or green aura. It\u2019s an excessively shadowy show, but unlike your Ozarks or Black Rabbit<\/a>s, it\u2019s a show that makes the darkness visually intelligible.<\/p>\n

\n\tIf that isn\u2019t enough, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis contribute one of their patented melodic dirges of a score, a welcome counterpoint to a soundtrack focused heavily on punk, because Harry Hole loves him some Ramones.<\/p>\n

\n\tSantelmann, who in certain light resembles a lanky Jason Statham, gives a performance that matches the somber aesthetic. Harry is a grouch and Oslo is his trash can, which isn\u2019t the way the city is traditionally depicted, with Santelmann making the descent into greater and greater bleakness seem organic. He has just enough hopeful scenes with Tjelta and Bochud to make Harry feel at least peripherally human, though the character can surely become exhausting to watch at times.<\/p>\n

\n\tHarry isn\u2019t a pleasant guy to be around, but in Kinnaman the series has a well-cast adversary. There is no point at which you\u2019re supposed to think that Tom is anything other than a smirking demon, the only question being how bad he\u2019ll get. Tom is like if Kinnaman\u2019s Holder, from AMC\u2019s adaptation of the Danish drama The Killing, were actually as wicked as everybody suspects him of being, and the actor is having a blast preening and sneering. It\u2019s a very charismatic performance, though the character is a bit of a mess \u2014 a hodge-podge of traumas and sexual pathologies meant to make him scarier, but rarely more human.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe rest of the ensemble is very good, especially Ellen Helinder as Beate, one of those jack-of-all-trades procedural characters who\u2019s handy whenever you need something technical or an investigative superpower is required. Ditto the overqualified cameo double of Peter Stormare<\/a>, as a gruff gang leader named Odin, and Anders Danielsen Lie<\/a>, as a man who\u2019s instantly morally suspicious because he recommends that Harry read more Heidegger.<\/p>\n

\n\tIf the storytelling were tighter and more successfully focused on its more sociologically provocative elements, Detective Hole could have settled into the overstuffed genre\u2019s top tier rather than taking a place in the acceptable middle. There are too many red herrings, too much fixation on naked corpses and fatal wounds, too much quoting of Revelations, too many misdirections that you\u2019ve seen before in comparable movies and television shows.<\/p>\n

\n\tBy the time the season nears its end and Harry \u2014 non-spoiler spoiler alert \u2014 finally sees the big picture, he looks at the suspect and plaintively inquires, \u201cWhy did it have to be so complicated?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSo complicated. So dark. Not a fun nine hours of television, but that\u2019s what happens when you go down a Harry Hole.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Who\u2019s ready for a dark odyssey into the murky recesses of Harry Hole? Stop it. Detective Hole The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":358053,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[147718,173416,146,173417,85,46,173418,11790,173419,411],"class_list":["post-358052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-anders-danielsen-lie","tag-detective-hole","tag-entertainment","tag-harry-hole","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-jo-nesbo","tag-joel-kinnaman","tag-peter-stormare","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358052","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=358052"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358052\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/358053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=358052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=358052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=358052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}