Hans Rosenfeldt

A body lies across the exact line between two countries, so that two police forces have to share it. That is the whole of Hans Rosenfeldt's founding idea for The Bridge (2011), and it is so simple that it is odd nobody had tried it before. Nearly everything he has done since runs on the same instinct: put two people from different systems and different temperaments in one car and see what the case does to them. The murder gets them into the car. What happens in the car is the series.

He came to television sideways. Five years as an actor with the Gothenburg National Theatre in the late 1980s, then radio, then the Swedish soaps Rederiet and Tre Kronor through the 1990s. Soap writing teaches you to keep a character alive for years while the plots come and go around them, and it shows. In 2006 Filmlance International hired him to devise a cross-border crime series; The Bridge arrived in 2011 and ran for four series and 38 episodes, ending in 2018. He created Marcella (2016–2021), his first series in English, and wrote with Michael Hjorth a run of Sebastian Bergman novels, begun in 2010 and later adapted for television. Cry Wolf (2024) is the most recent, again with a woman at its centre.

The strength is the detective. Rosenfeldt writes women whose flaws and private lives drive the story at least as hard as the crime does, and in Saga Norén, played by Sofia Helin across all four series, he wrote one we would recognise from across a street. Two of the four series of The Bridge are close to faultless. In the other two the plotting strains, and it is Helin who covers for it. We noticed, some way into the weaker series, that we had stopped caring who had done it and cared entirely whether Saga would be all right, and we do not think that was an accident; it is what he had been building towards for years.

That is also the limit. A writer who can make you care more about the detective than the case will sometimes let the case go slack, and over 38 episodes the reasons for two countries to keep sharing a murder begin to look like reasons. He has stayed inside the crime genre for most of his working life, and the nearest thing to a criticism of him is that he has never left it.

He has said he is not really watching crime shows at the moment, and among his projects is an adaptation of Ronja the Robber's Daughter, a children's story with no detective in it. We would like to see whether a man who has spent nearly twenty years finding reasons to lay a body across a border can hold an audience without one. On the evidence of Saga Norén, he probably can.