TV Eye: Speechless in Seattle

Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos), here with Stephen Holder (Joel Kinnaman) in The Killing, is a strange sort of cop who doesn't say much. Photo / Supplied

For some reason I love reading cop procedurals but don't much like watching them. There are exceptions: Cracker, Prime Suspect, State of Play. So perhaps that's the answer. There aren't as many good cop procedurals on the telly.

The Killing (SoHo, Wednesdays, 8.30pm) is a good one: an American remake of the Danish series, which I haven't seen (life's too short for cop procedurals with subtitles) but it is, apparently, a fairly faithful remake.

Down to the lead copper's (Mireille Enos as Sarah Linden) costume. Does a fair isle jumper transfer from Denmark to Seattle? All right, it obviously gets cold in winter in Seattle but you'd think she could have splashed out on a duffel coat, say.

It seems a strange get-up for an American detective, but Sarah Linden is a strange sort of cop. She doesn't talk much. "I'm not one for words," she says to her bloke. You'd think he already knew that. She only had to say two words: "I do."

They were moving, with Sarah's teenage son, who hates his stepfather, to sunny California. Except that we could already guess how that's going to go. Sarah got a last case, on her last day. She was still on the "city's dime". She met her replacement: a gawky idiot who asked a teacher if the missing teenage girl was hot. She is, surely, going to utter a few words, those being: "I don't".

And also, what the hell would she wear in sunny California? You can't imagine that there are too many occasions on which a fair isle jumper would be called for. (It is, as an aside, going to get really annoying, not to mention scratchy, if she wears that bloody jumper the whole time.

It's the equivalent of putting black-framed specs on a librarian to disguise her sexiness, and having her whip 'em off to reveal that she was sexy all along. You can't have a telly cop unless she's sexy, so let's just get it over with.)

Other than that, so far so good, in an appropriately chilly sort of way, given the subject matter. (Brr, pass me my fair isle jumper, I said, while I was watching the first episode. But damn it, I must have left it in Greymouth in 1976.)

It's not just Sarah who isn't much good at articulating, and that's a good thing. People in awful situations are not articulate. They howl and rage and have no words.

The Killing captures this wordlessness. And it's going to get messy enough without cluttering the thing up with needless dialogue. There's something going on with the mayoral candidate (and not just the hanky panky with his campaign manager - who is sexy even without a fair isle jumper.) I'll be watching.

I won't, however, be watching Dancing with the Stars US, which for some inexplicable reason is on TV One on Sunday nights at 8.30pm.

Not even to see Kourtney Kardashian's repellent partner, Scott Disick - a man whose hankering to be famous makes the Kardashians look like shrinking violets - make an arse of himself (for that you watch The Kardashians.)

Cher's daughter-now-son, Chaz Bono, is also a contestant, as is somebody called Carson Kressley, who was briefly famous on a stupid programme called Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. This is Desperate Stuff, with no Stars. Why?

-TimeOut