James Wolcott reviews The Killing. Excellent.
Hardly anyone I know personally seems to be following The Killing and it gets scant mention on my Twitter timeline (compared to the orgy spasm over Sharknado or the weekly bull sessions over Mad Men), and I get why so many are unable to get into it. It's so somber and monochromatic in mood, look, and weather, so hunched over and muttery, so full of pondering pauses, with none of Breaking Bad'sdeclamatory rhetoric, savage moments of Road Runner cartoon slapstick ("Magnets"
, and parched, expansive mock-Sergio Leone horizons and standoffs. Its humor is very sidelong and sly, nearly all of it due to Joel Kinnaman's genius line delivery as Holder. But it's very compelling and it's drilling deep into the American dysfunction of drugs, infrastructural decay, discarded children, the hustling for smaller and smaller sums in the lowest tier of the underground economy, the garbaging of the human body, the general blech happening below the underpass. (Converting the underclass into zombies is taking the easy narrative way out.) Given its forbidding load of foreboding, The Killing wouldn't work if it didn't cast a visual-aural spell, and I'm finding the trance strengthening as the season goes on. I also think Sarsgaard's performance--crafty, bluffing, nasty, anguished, at times defiantly opaque (as if the hood of his thoughts has been pulled down)--deserves way more attention and commendation than it's gotten.
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The character not the actor.
There had better be more somewhere. 
