By SARAH LYALL
LONDON — To explain the appeal of “The Killing,” a four-year-old, 20-part, subtitled Danish crime thriller that has become an unexpected hit on British television this winter, it helps to describe not so much what the series has, but what it does not.
It has no wild car chases ending with vehicles spewing smoke and ready to blow. It has no serial murderers and no explosions. Its detectives are not brilliant, semi-autistic types; high-functioning alcoholics; or Bergmanesque depressives haunted by dark personal traumas (although the main investigator is so consumed by the job that she barely ever changes her sweater).
“It’s not action-driven,” said Alexander Coridass, president and chief executive of ZDF Enterprises, a German company that co-produced the series. “It doesn’t have an erotic clamor or a fast pace.”
But, the series’s passionate viewers say, the very things that could be drawbacks — the slowness, the emotional unfolding of the story, the unflashiness of it all — are the things that make it so addictive.
“It’s so much more than a whodunit,” the critic Robin Jarossi wrote on Crime Time Preview, a Web site devoted to British crime shows. “The power of the series is the brilliantly drawn, complex characters, who can make bad choices or lie but never lose our empathy.”
Originally broadcast in Denmark in 2007 under the title “Forbrydelsen,” the series begins with scenes of a girl running for her life through the woods, her panicked breathing forming a grisly soundtrack. This is Nanna Birk Larsen, whose tortured, sexually abused body is subsequently found in the trunk of a car dredged from a canal.
The series goes on to describe, in slow and intimate detail, the effects of Nanna’s murder on her grieving parents, desperate to keep their marriage and lives together; on a politically ambitious city council member who is somehow connected to the case; and on the police investigators, led by the monosyllabic Scandinavian-sweater-wearing Sarah Lund. Theories are entertained and discarded; suspects are detained and released; everyone harbors a secret.
Each of the 20 episodes represents a day in the investigation, a little like “24,” in which each episode covered an hour of a full day.
“That’s the difference between America and Europe — they take 24 hours; we take 20 days,” said Piv Bernth, who produced the series for the Danish Broadcasting Corporation.
In fact, “The Killing” has been remade for the United States, and that one will have its AMC premiere on April 3. The American version hews very closely to the original, with the same three-strand plot and with characters modeled on the Danish ones, said Joel Stillerman, AMC’s senior vice president for original programming, production and digital content.
“We tried to embrace a lot of what we thought made it incredible, including the Nordic sensibility, the stoicism of Sarah Lund and the lack of that overtly frenetic behavior that you’re constantly seeing on American crime and police shows,” Mr. Stillerman said. “Instead of having a chase scene with a standard bunch of cop cars with their lights flashing, we have things that you’d be much more likely to see in a horror movie — a scary walk down a dark hallway with the right piece of music.”
The series was a phenomenal hit in Denmark, where the final episode had a roughly 75 percent market share. (There was a second similarly popular season; a third is being discussed.) The distributors have sold it to broadcasters in, among other places, Australia, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Belgium — both the French and the Flemish-speaking parts.
In Britain the show has been averaging about 500,000 viewers an episode, a huge number for BBC4, a station with a generally tiny audience, on a Saturday night. (Its ratings are higher than those of the same channel’s showings of “Mad Men.”) The series has made an international star out of Sofie Grabol, one of Denmark’s most celebrated actresses, who plays Sarah Lund. It has been a stretch, Ms. Grabol said.
“I had always played very emotionally expressive women,” she said when interviewed by telephone backstage at Denmark’s national theater, where she was rehearsing “Fanny and Alexander.” But this time, invited by the producers and writer to help conceive the character, she told them that she wanted “someone who was not communicative at all, who was very isolated, but at peace with it.”
And then, she said: “I started thinking, ‘Who do I know who behaves like that?’ And they were all men. I decided to try to imagine I was a man, and that was key. After a week or two, the role opened up for me.”
Sarah Lund’s sweater has also become an unexpected object of fetishistic attention; whole discussion threads on “Killing” fan sites are devoted to it, including tips on where to buy such sweaters and how to care for them.
“The sweater actually allows me to tell a lot of stories about this character,” Ms. Grabol said. “The top layer tells of a woman who is so confident in herself that she doesn’t have to wear a suit to get respect. Nor does she use her sexuality to communicate.”
The last two episodes of “The Killing” are to be broadcast here in Britain on Saturday night, after a shocking development in episode No. 18 last week that changed the course of the investigation.
“This is program-making with no mercy,” wrote a poster named KeturahB on The Guardian’s “Killing” blog. “It’s unbearable to have to wait a week to find out — and then it’s all over. Even worse.”
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