Far piece from Luke Cage, and it's not just about race.
Pop crime shows are big on grime, social trash, and violence.
Wallander is pitched at a more intelligent audience.
If Luke is the norm for masculinity and the cops on that show the norm for police, Kurt is a girl trapped in a man's body and the Swedish police, though armed and no sissies, are a bunch of polite social workers.
And suburban Sweden is far from darkest Harlem.
On a different note, Kurt is now 55 but looks like he's in his early sixties.
Though a reasonably fit fellow he has type two diabetes.
To make matters worse, his father suffered Alzheimer's for a good part of his aging years, and in the series of books the show is based on he ends up going the same way.
He leaves the gas burning in his kitchen and it starts a fire.
He takes his gun out of his holster at a restaurant because it's uncomfortable sitting, and forgets it there when he leaves.
The gun is found by a little girl who gives it to her dad, who turns it in to the police, who put him on suspension.
55 is awfully young to start to lose it.
My mother, 90, is at the stage where she forgets what's just been said quite a lot.
Her Alzheimer's started in her 80's.
Grim finish, really, for a fairly grim but excellent series.
Kenneth Branagh is a justly famous and wealthy actor who has done a splendid job playing a character who is his social and economic inferior.
Unless independently wealthy like Gunvald Larsson in the Martin Beck series, police are working class and lower middle class at best, however decently educated.
And most of them aren't really, of course.
Update.
Humphrey Bogart died at 55 of lung cancer.
Is that a worse fate?
Hard to say.
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