Euro TV to Watch: Fallet, Murder Mystery & Nordic Noir Crime Drama Spoof

Another pick for this year’s best new Euro TV series is Fallet, the hilarious spoof of Scandinoir crime dramas and a proper murder mystery to boot.

Fallet (aka The Case) is a brilliant comedy and mystery series rolled into one utterly binge-watchable eight-episode series.

The story follows two of the most mediocre if not flat-out terrible detectives one is likely to see on telly. One is DCI Tom Brown (Adam Godley, Powers, A Young Doctor’s Notebook), a mild-mannered, overly-polite British copper described by one character as the Tom Barnaby (from Midsomer Murders) of St. Ives. The other is Sophie Borg (Lisa Henni, Midnight Sun, Beck), a brash young officer with Sweden’s National CID who fires her weapon too often and goes by guilty until proven innocent.

Tom and Sophie botch their most recent respective case — his a recent homicide and hers involving former Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, assassinated in 1986 — and each pleads for one last chance to prove him- and herself. And they get it. As partners on a case of a British man murdered in Norrbacka.

The narrative is relatively intricate, as one would expect in a good Scandinoir or British mystery series, and like most of them, the one in Fallet includes more dead bodies and even a red herring here and there.

And in the midst of it all are references to some of the most popular Nordic Noir crime dramas (with a nod to a few British ones) and Scandinavian authors whose crime novels have been adapted for television, as well as a lot of familiar faces for viewers who consume a lot of Euro TV shows.

I won’t divulge any of the specifics here, because doing so would really ruin the fun of Fallet. What I will say, though, is that one scene in Episode 4 had me laughing so hard, I could barely breathe. (Just thinking about it now is making me chuckle.) And I let out a squeal of delight at an under-5-seconds cameo by an actor from a long-running and hugely popular Swedish mystery series.

There are more cameos and guffaw-inducing scenes, and these alone are worth watching Fallet for if you’re a Euro TV fan. At about a half-hour per episode, you can binge the entire season in 4 hours.

Costarring in Fallet are Tomas von Brömssen (Saltön) as Norrbacka Chief of Police Klas Wall, Christoffer Nordenrot (Blue Eyes) as Klas’ son Bill, Stina Rautelin (Beck) as forensic scientist Sonja Mustanaamio, Lia Boysen (Jordskott) as Sophie’s mother Kristina von Borg, Dag Malmberg (The Bridge) as Kristina’s husband Melcher von Borg, Meliz Karlge (Johan Falk) as journalist Zarah Arnesen, and Björn Granath (Millennium) as Zarah’s powerful husband Arne Arnesen.

Shown in English and Swedish (and a bit of Finnish and Danish), Fallet is currently streaming globally (outside of Sweden) on Netflix.