Fortitude

     A few weeks ago, I began watching Fortitude, a British-produced thriller set in a remote Norwegian village with a played-out coal mine, a growing scientific research center, ambitious eco-tourism hopes and an ongoing string of mysterious deaths, many if not all of them murders.

     It could have been a dull and claustrophobic set-piece.  It's marvelously not; instead, it plays like a collaboration between Michael Crichton and H. P. Lovecraft that had been produced by the team that made the first season of True Detective.

     While it has not yet managed quite the intensity of TD, it comes as close as anything I've seen; like the American program, the characters are well-realized, full of very real-seeming conflict and contradiction.  The backstory plays out in a series of partial glimpses, a little more every episode, in a manner at once natural and unnerving.  Eight and a half episodes in, there's plenty of conflict but still no clear sense of who to cheer on and who to hiss at.

     I'm enjoying it.

     ETA, 12 hours later: so I got to the end of the episode and kinda got icked out a couple of times.  But I'm still watching.