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| Kenneth Branagh stars in new crime series |
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| Visit the Masterpiece site: www.pbs.org/masterpiece/ |
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In the bucolic but brutal seaside town of Ystad, Sweden, Inspector Kurt Wallander has been solving heinous crimes for his entire middle-aged career. In his first recurring television role, Kenneth Branagh brings the scruffy Swedish sleuth to life in the Masterpiece Mystery! series “Wallander,” based on the international bestselling books by Henning Mankell. The first story, “Sidetracked,” airs Sunday, May 10 at 9/8 p.m. CT on KET1 and KET HD and Thursday, May 14 at 9/8 p.m. CT on KET2. Branagh, a co-producing partner and a longtime fan of the novels, describes his character as “wonderfully complex and compelling.” Shot in rarely seen locations in southern Sweden, each program is adapted from one of Mankell’s highly acclaimed whodunits. Mankell pits his hero against the creeping malaise affecting contemporary Sweden, where permissiveness and the collapse of the welfare state are slowly undermining the spirit of law and order. Naturally, Mankell heightens the chaos a bit, but the result is a maelstrom of bizarre crimes to tax Wallander’s wits, involving ax murders, scalpings, random assassinations and cyber terrorism. In “Sidetracked,” an unknown young woman sets herself on fire in a field, leading to a search for her identity. Could her suicide be connected to a string of grisly ax murders that are felling members of Swedish high society? And why is the killer scalping the victims? Ominously, a profiler tells Wallander that he should be looking for someone who seems completely normal. Other upcoming programs include “Firewall,” in which two teenage girls murder a taxi driver in a senseless robbery, a computer systems analyst drops dead for no apparent reason and the local power grid is on the blink; and “One Step Behind,” wherein three young people celebrating Midsummer’s Eve in a secluded meadow are ritually gunned down in the first of several murders. Masterpiece Mystery! “Wallander” is produced by WGBH/Boston. More information about KET programming and education services, as well as how to support KET, can be found at www.ket.org.
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