Viewers usually look to cable for their quality Sunday night TV viewing, but every series there seems to have ended for the season, such as “Breaking Bad” last week. HBO is showing movies tonight.
So it’s easy to see that the best drama on TV tonight is on public television, with the first of three new “Wallander” features on “Masterpiece Mystery” (PBS, 9 p.m., check local listings).
The acclaimed actor Kenneth Branagh stars and directs the stories adapted from the best selling mysteries by Henning Mankell. It’s the third series of “Wallander” stories from him, and by now he’s starting to embody the brooding, disheveled, single minded detective.
And even as he begins tonight’s episode trying to have a bit of a life for himself with a companion by the sea, the grim realities of murder seem to visit him as well in a dandy story.
“He seems to he seems to live just for the job and to have a kind of empathy for the victims of a crime that is almost dangerous to him in the way that it’s sort of emotionally debilitating, and he actually is distinct from other Swedish detectives,” Branagh told reporters at the TV Critics press tour.
Unlike other TV detectives, he doesn’t have the gimmicky coat or hat or toothpick to distinguish himself. In fact, he says, “The parka he discovered the bones in his garden with has been a source of some discussion in the U.K. as a wild departure from Wallander fashionwise.”
From the beginning, it was the decision of director Philip Martin to use a consistent English accent for everybody despite the obvious setting in Sweden, with Swedish road signs and such even if “it drives some people mad.”
It would have done no one any good to try Swedish accents, Branagh said. “If ill done, it can be can probably seem comical” especially because of “the shared cultural experience of the Swedish chef from the Muppets.
“That’s not how Swedish people speak, but that comic exaggeration has some currency out in the world, and I certainly didn’t want Wallander to sound that way. I wasn’t entirely confident about my ability to sidestep the Swedish chef.”
If there is some Swedish imprint on the character, it comes in using deadpan humor.