Final Thoughts on AMC’s THE KILLING

I wrote a piece mid-way through this season of AMC’s latest drama THE KILLING that touched on some minor complaints I have with the show and its formula. I had hoped that by season’s end a lot of these issues would be nullified and producer Veena Sud and co. could find surer footing and leave us with what we thought we were getting when this season began: a poignant drama/mystery about a stoic homicide detective and her itchy but surprisingly competent partner. But more importantly, I hoped they’d give us a satisfactory conclusion.

A quick recap: Bennett Ahmed did not murder Rosie, and when given the chance to kill him outright, Stan took the high road. That is, until Mitch stepped in and goaded him for not being manly enough to tackle the man who maybe murdered their daughter. Stan and Belko beat the living daylights out of Bennett, who, as it turns out, was only guilty of helping a Somali girl escape genital mutilation and flee to Canada. The sweater of the Somali girl that Mitch swore was Rosie’s is found in her dryer as she does some laundry, but that’s not enough to make Mitch feel like a jerk. She refuses to bail Stan out of jail after she finds out he’s bankrupted the family (by purchasing a new house as a “surprise” behind her back – and who the hell even does that?).

Things take a turn when it’s uncovered that Rosie was moonlighting as an escort for the Beau Soleil service that also employs her aunt. A girl at the service tried to warn others via a message board about a creeper using the alias “Orpheus” who drove her down to the water and asked her if she ever wondered what it might be like to drown. That man? Darren Richmond. This, paired with ATM surveillance footage of Rosie at a local casino paints a picture of a girl that seemingly no one knew. And here I thought the viewers were the only ones being left in the dark.

The season ends with Linden and Holder obtaining screenshots from a toll booth of Darren heading over to the casino in the campaign car, which is enough to arrest him. Mitch moves out of the family home – a development that you couldn’t pay me to care about at this point (more on that in a minute) – and Holder is revealed to be the dirty cop we assumed he was from day one when we witness him thanking an anonymous accomplice for doctoring the toll booth photo. Linden’s on a plane to Sonoma and Belko pulls a Bickle and pulls a gun on Richmond outside the police station and then… fade to friggin’ black. That’s all she wrote. No, really. That seems to be all Veena Sud and her cadre of writers wrote.

I gave THE KILLING more of a chance than most, I think. I made excuses for their overuse and over-reliance on the grieving family, honestly believing that the end result would be ultimately moving and rewarding. I made excuses for the over abundance of red herrings – after all, when one is conducting an investigation, one follows every possible lead through to the very end. For example, Bennett’s end was a coma-inducing beating at the hands of Stan. It made sense that every suspect would need to be thoroughly vetted and every avenue explored before they could move on to the next. Sure, it seemed like a stalling tactic at the worst of times, but certainly all of this bluffing would pay off, right?

It didn’t. The cliffhanger ending would be more acceptable if it were executed with a modicum of integrity, but it wasn’t. Instead of being the fresh-faced freshman drama on the network that prides itself on excellent long-form storytelling, THE KILLING has proven to be nothing more than a condescending, gimmicky exercise in futility. This sounds like I absolutely loathe the show, but it’s quite the contrary: I like THE KILLING. I think there’s incredible promise to this show, even after this half-cooked finale. Mireille Enos and Joel Kinnaman are exceptional and provide a solid backbone for the series; unfortunately, the writing does them little justice.

Are we really supposed to believe that Linden’s detective skills are limited to impassive staring and dumb luck? It just so happens that she’s in Richmond’s apartment when her e-mail bait sets off a “ding” on his computer. It just so happens that she bumps into the ferry schedule during a jog, which gives her the name that was scrawled on a piece of paper in Rosie’s book and takes her to the casino that shares a gigantic f*#king logo with the keys found with Rosie’s body. Everything is either casually thrown in Linden’s lap or gleaned from five minutes of daydreaming. To Enos’ credit, she’s a fantastic stoic lead, but those brooding looks can only carry her so far. You can’t possibly expect your viewers to believe that a seasoned and respected homicide detective doesn’t know the name of the ferry in her own town, or the logo of a major casino. Perhaps if the writers spent less time padding the show with grief and overloading it with red herrings, they could give Linden some legitimate detective work instead of sloppily spoon-feeding her answers at the 11th hour.

Producer Veena Sud’s name should have set off a warning siren. As the producer of COLD CASE (yes, really), Sud is accustomed to hour-long, sappy procedurals. But where COLD CASE is sort of notorious for exploring (albeit half-assed) the histories of its victims and illuminating on the past, THE KILLING dismisses any notion of ever letting its viewers really know Rosie. After all, if we got to know Rosie, we might be a step ahead of the writers. Make no mistake about it: these writers do not think you are intelligent.

Either through willful ignorance or sheer egotism, the writing team behind THE KILLING thinks you are an idiot. Why else would they begin the season by pointing to Richmond as suspect number one, point you in every other direction and take the long way around at season’s end to tell you that it’s probably Richmond before hinting that it’s not him in a scene that feels like an afterthought? It’s incredibly condescending television. I felt almost desperate to believe that this story of dirty politics was being used in some way to mirror the crime of the city or the struggles of our detectives… Or something. I wanted to believe that this political narrative meant something, somehow. I even enjoyed it for half of the season, until I slowly began to realize that this plot was nothing more than the writers rubbing our nose in the obvious answer. And they did it with such arrogance. This entire plot truly has been meaningless because Richmond is the prime suspect, and it’s the only reason we’ve had to sit through his dull campaign strategizing and agonizing love life. While we’ve had moments of honest and compelling humanity through Richmond – his dead wife, his squeaky morale – what other purpose could this narrative possibly serve?

I can think of few shows that have successfully stuck the landing with a major cliffhanger in the finale – LOST and BREAKING BAD to name a couple – but those shows did so without being patronizing toward their viewership. If THE KILLING had simply dropped the Photoshopped toll booth photo element or re-worked it and saved it for season two, I might have felt differently. The abrupt ending wasn’t entirely appalling, but considering the lack of character development with Belko (we didn’t start getting to know him until late in the season), it feels like a desperate ploy.

THE KILLING could also lose much of the grieving family plot. While it served a purpose in the first half of the season, showing the ripple effect of one person’s death and providing a nice build to the attack on Bennett Ahmed, in the second half of the season it’s grating and maudlin. We get it, they’re sad and their lives are falling apart. In the finale, Mitch says something to the effect of “Everything in this house hurts me.” Maybe the writers thought this was a genuinely heartbreaking moment, but it did little more than elicit an eye roll from this viewer. In any typical household, Stan would have come clean about where the money went. I understand the moment at the jail, and how Mitch was so indignant that Stan couldn’t possibly explain anything to her, but back at home when Stan returns and she utters that absurd line? That would be the perfect moment to tell your wife, “Hey, we don’t have to live here anymore because I bought a new house! Hooray!”

There’s another show that exists within THE KILLING and it’s called THE GRIEVING, only it’s even more half-cooked and listless than its counterpart. Should they remove the family entirely? No. I admire the intention to create empathy for the murdered Rosie Larsen by letting us get to know her family. When people are grieving the best and worst parts of themselves emerge, and we can slowly understand where Rosie came from. But what good is any of that when we don’t know Rosie at all? Even worse – no one seems to know her at all, not even the writers.

At most I thought Rosie Larsen’s murder mystery story hour would take up one season. It became startlingly apparent twenty minutes into the finale that Sud & Co. had no intention or even fleeting notion of wrapping up this story in one go. I thought that perhaps each season would focus on a new killing and the ensuing mystery, but instead we’re getting at least two seasons. Some advice for AMC, Sud, et al.: Hire new writers. Surely you can borrow one or two from BREAKING BAD. They know how to write ghetto, itchy white boy quite well. Maybe there are some leftovers from better mystery shows, like DEXTER. Darabont wisely scrapped his writers after one season of THE WALKING DEAD and I say good on him; the dialogue wasn’t what it could be, and for a show based on a comic book with a plot outline already written, you’d think you’d have more time to develop better dialogue. After all, comic book dialogue is incredibly clunky and expository for the most part. There’s no shame, KILLING showrunners, in weeding out the chaff and using some of that production budget to bring on more seasoned writers. And I’m not talking about a group of “yes men.” Bring on some honest-to-goodness legitimate writers with good ideas on how to improve your crime drama and build compelling character-driven mystery.

It’s bad form to treat your audience like a moron. Reality shows do this. Friedberg and Seltzer do this with their “spoof” films. Stephanie Meyer feverishly rolls about in her giant bed full of your money every night while she writes masturbatory young adult garbage. AMC has built their modern name on quality original programming, and the showrunners of THE KILLING should know better.