Beck: Episodes 1-3 (Set 1)

In Swedish, but with subtitles. If subtitles is ok with the viewer, then this Swedish police procedural is an interesting look at a society different for the U.S.

The Martin Beck books from Sweden are some of the greatest crime novels ever written. There were only 7 books in the series and they were the original Scandinavian noir novels. I wasn't expecting this Swedish TV series to be anywhere near as good as the books and it isn't. Even so, I like these TV shows for entirely different reasons.The books are set during a time period at least a couple of decades before the time when the TV shows are set. I suppose they wanted them to be more modern, as in they have cell phones, which I hate for many reasons, but there's still enough in there from the books that inspired these shows in the TV adaptations to keep me interested.The shows are in Swedish with subtitles and the actor who plays Martin Beck isn't anything like I pictured him. But he is totally devoted to his job and his marriage has fallen apart so those parts are true. They don't have all the characters from the books but they do have an important one, his right hand guy is really great and the actor who plays him is superb. They also bring in a female detective, a gorgeous Swedish blonde. I don't recall any such person in the books but I don't mind, she's a great character.Be warned, the subject matter is very dark. There are pedophiles, junkies, serial killers. Really dangerous themes. The very first program was so depressing I almost stopped watching the series right there. But I gave it another shot and by the second show I was really getting into it.I plan to watch the entire series!

After having exhausted, it seemed, the supply of British mystery/police-procedural series, I turned my attention to foreign (non-English-language) productions. If you are not averse to subtitles, you will find among foreign productions some outstanding series in this genre, and "Beck" is one of them."Beck" - after "Wallander" and "Van Veeteren" - is the third Swedish-language police-procedural series I have watched, and it may be the best, which is high praise. I should qualify that by saying that I have watched only the first 18 episodes of "Beck" (produced from 1997 to 2005), available in the USA as sets 1 through 6. Eight subsequent episodes have been produced and released on DVD, but not yet, as far as I can tell, with Region 1 encoding."Beck," which aired as a Swedish TV series from 1997 to 2009, is based on the books of Mai Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö in which Inspector Martin Beck, the lead detective of a special homicide team of the Swedish police, was the central character. I gather that the team (in this series) is based in Stockholm, but the crimes they investigate are not limited to that city. Each episode is approximately 90 minutes in length and represents a complete case. I found the stories to be uniformly engrossing, and in several there were twists at the end that I did not see coming.Tying the episodes together is a cadre of well-cast, well-acted characters that appear in all, or nearly all, episodes, and other characters whose tenure spans fewer episodes. Three characters, who appear in all episodes, merit special mention: Beck: level-headed, insightful, possessed of more of an everyman quality than most leading characters; Gunvald, Beck's right-hand man: brash, swaggering, politically incorrect, tough - the iron fist in Beck's velvet glove; Grannen: Beck's wonderfully eccentric neighbor - he rarely failed to make me laugh.Note: As a result of having read a review that lauded the series but was critical of the quality of the quality of the video transfer, especially in light of the fact the reviewer considered the DVD sets to be pricey, I purchased just this set and was attentive to image quality when I watched the first episode. What I found was that the video transfer is not state of the art but neither is it, in my opinion, bad. More importantly, it quickly ceased to be an issue as I was pulled into the series. And after I finished the first set, I purchased the remaining five.

I thought I might like Beck because I do like Swedish and Danish detective stories. But I had to return this item because it was too brutal for my viewing. So if you dont mind fast forwarding alot of scenes and dialogue, it might okay to stay with it. But not for me!

Fans of recent Swedish film wll recognise Peter Haber who plays Beck from TGWTDT. He's the morose tortured cop-hero of this series, clawing his way through the seedier muck of Stockholms underworld. His boss is a jerk, his partner is an angry toughguy and he has a crush on the female member of the team. He's made even more human with a daughter, a wayward stepson and a cooky neighbor. If you enjoy good mystery, good acting and a decent interconnected story with believable subplotting like the stuff we get from England (Inspector Lewis, the recent Zen, George Gently and others) you'll like this. This is true of both Series 1 and 2. You have to be able to handle subtitles though. I would have given it five stars instead of four were it dubbed in English and if the plots were drawn slightly more sharply and the making the videos 5 minutes shorter. But these are minor drawbacks that mystery buffs will suffer through for stories and acting like these like these.