(Bloomberg) – Brooders rejoice. Swedish detective Kurt Wallander, perhaps the most melancholy man on television, is back on PBS starting Oct. 3 at 9 p.m. New York time. Wallander (Kenneth Branagh) has plenty of reason to mope in “Faceless Killers,” the first of three episodes in “Wallander II.” The shows are based on the crime novels of Henning Mankell and hosted by Alan Cumming, the slithery political aide in “The Good Wife.” He’s trying to solve the extremely grisly murder of an elderly Swedish couple that has inspired a hate group to target foreign workers, who are suspected of having carried out the gruesome deed. His father (David Warner)_is in the grips of dementia and has taken to strolling the roadways in his pajamas, burning his furniture and beating his skull while screaming “Space!” He also pleads to his son, “For God’s sake don’t put me away,” as if he might take rumors of euthanasia quite seriously. Meanwhile, daughter Linda (Jeany Spark) has taken up with a Syrian doctor, which appears to have incited a repressed strain of xenophobia in the deeply decent Wallander, who detests the anti-foreigner sentiment in his fellow Swedes. Plus he’s living in the port town of Ystad, home to a fair number of psychos and, in the opening episode, murderous thugs who run the Tilt A Whirl at a traveling fair. This first-rate drama is far different from your typical cop series, where most of the women are babes, the men tend to be glib cynics, and even the file clerks can dust a felon without remorse. Wallander’s got no swagger, no wisecracks, and definitely no tan. He doesn’t waltz onto a crime scene but instead takes a preparatory deep breath as if he’s about to get himself a root canal. Bodies spook him as opposed to shows where the cops might use a dead man’s chest for an ashtray. And he’s almost impossible not to like. Wallander’s without pretension or, it appears, an ironed shirt. He’s got stubble on his face, a mole under his lip, and hair he clearly combs twice a year, max. He appears to have last done a sit-up in the 1980s. His heart is very much with the downtrodden, especially migrant workers, who are under the gun in the opener. One is shot dead in a field and after an explosion at a worker camp Wallander runs into a burning trailer to perform a heroic rescue – though it turns out he saves an inanimate object. Perhaps there’s something symbolic there, as with other scenes featuring dead flies on a window sill and a roaming white stallion that doesn’t get to trot off into the Nordic sunset. There’s also lots of stark scenery and a musical score featuring lonely piano lines, all of which may put viewers in a Wallander frame of mind. Yet he is a competent cop. “I am not interested in correctness” he declares, but only “the truth.” With the help of a tipster he discovers the elderly deaths may involve a mistress, a bastard son and lots of money. He finally gets one of his men in a way that would make Dirty Hairy proud yet this sends him into a profoundly deep funk, even though if ever a thug deserved to die it was this one: a neo-nazi assassin who was working hard to kill Wallander. You find yourself wondering if this conflicted cop should find another line of work, a thought that haunts Wallander as the series continues through October 17. Think of him as Brother Grim with a badge, and a terrific show.
