Today, months after anyone cared, I wrote a post for Overthinking It walking back my earlier enthusiasm for AMC’s The Killing in light of its awful season finale:
Season 1 of The Killing plays out like a bad improv show.
Suspects are introduced and then flatly discarded without leading anywhere else. Rosie Larsen’s ex-boyfriend was molesting another girl on camera, not Rosie. Bennett Ahmed was misleading his students and the detectives because he was smuggling a girl to Canada to avoid genital mutilation. Rosie was making home movies; Rosie wanted to see the world; Rosie was tricking for an online escort service; Rosie was making large withdrawals from a casino ATM. All of these leads are summoned up, brooded over for an episode or two, and then discarded.
This would be worse than amateur improv, summoning up maybe a few pitying chuckles from the audience. For a show with a supposed script? It’s inexcusable.
More indulgent than my usual posts, in that I do little but apologize for being wrong, but I think there’s still some good matter. Ch-ch-ch-ch-check it.