SBS On Demand is somewhat up shit creek and I'm not sure whether it's my TV or the service but I suspect it's the service. Often it will forget where you're at in a show, and also, it will play the show simultaneously with the soundtrack to an ad or something else.
This particular crime procedural is one of those shows that starts out with an intriguing premise (a series of drownings) wrapped in an appealing concept (father and son work as policemen together, trying to improve their relationship). I won't say what happens in the end but I will say that the last episode in particular brings an explanation for the whole situation which really challenges all credibility. Which is OK in one sense, we don't need stuff to be completely realistic (it'd be boring if it was) but there's a pretty elaborate scaffold erected here and it's not completely satisfying.
The show is set in Porvoo, one of the oldest of Finnish cities and not that far from Helsinki (less than 30km from Helsinki's border) but definitely its own city. We get quite a few nice shots of the turn-of-the-last-century houses and streets of, I assume, Porvoo (I've never been there) including a very attractive small square which occasionally has little market and/or celebration events in it. There's also a lot of pleasing aerial shots of the town.
I will say, and I think this is generally a positive feature of these Finnish police shows which are probably on the whole a little bit generic, the women in the show - who are not really the main characters - are often quite well-rounded characters with attitudes and opinions. In that sense there's a certain realism to the whole. This show has one policewoman in particular who is a bit juvenile (in a raunchy way) but not capricious.
The main character of the show is Antti Hautalehto - he is neither the father nor the son of the main story, but I gather an ongoing flawed hero character of a series of books by Christian Rönnbacka, none of which have been translated into English. 'Hatualehto' is, apparently, a word meaning cemetery or I think literally 'grave grove'; there is even a reference made to this fact in the show. He's only a flawed hero as far as I can tell because he cares too much about being a policeman and it's destroyed his marriage (a sub-plot herein is his cultivation of a new relationship while he deals with his anger/distress about the ruination of the old). But he is an appealing character, and Mikko Leppilampi plays him well. I'd like access to more of these stories but currently that's not possible.
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