Posted in: Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh, Movies, TV | Tagged: low winter sun, tv

Move Along, No Winter Sun – Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh

Adi Tantimedh writes

I wrote about The Counselor for this week but it turned out the film was still under press embargo in the UK, so I decided to write about something else while that column is held till next week.

Let's talk about Low Winter Sun.

Yeah, might as well kick a dead horse while it's not only down but also been rotting in the streets for a few weeks now.

Low Winter Sun is a recent cop noir series produced by AMC, the cable channel that also produced critical and ratings darlings Mad Men and The Walking Dead. It's a remake of a British miniseries from 2006 co-produced by Channel Four in the UK and BBC America.

This is what I wrote about the UK original miniseries back in 2011.

"Produced for television by Channel Four and BBC America, this is a slice of Scottish noir, so you know you're in for some bleakness here. Mark Strong gets a rare lead role from the usual brooding baddies he gets typecast as in movies, here playing a copper who starts the story by murdering a fellow cop and making it look like a drunken accident-suicide by putting the body behind the wheel of his car and driving it into the river. The plan is for him and his slippery partner to be assigned the investigation where they can complete the cover-up. However, when the car is hauled out of the drink, they find a new surprise: there's another body in the boot. This sends Strong into a spiral of paranoia and recrimination where he realises he had been set up to murder the cop and he has to find out who has really been pulling the strings while avoiding exposure by his own squad, which has already been reeling under accusations of corruption. The plot cleverly takes on a spiral structure to mirror Strong's sense of mental and emotional vertigo as he scrambles to find out the extent of the dead cop's corruption and we discover the core of loneliness and desperation for love that put Strong in the free-fall that led to him committing murder in the first place. The basic premise is an interesting one: when a murder detective commits murder, how compromised does he become? This has only been shown once in the UK and the US and is only available on UK DVD."

Got that? Now imagine everything the UK original version got right… and then imagine how the US remake gets virtually all of those parts horribly wrong. In fact, the AMC remake is virtually a textbook example of how Hollywood remakes screw up a good original European version into a crap US version.

Where the original UK miniseries was a lean 5-hour story, the US version sets out to create a new long-running series by stretching its story out to 10 episodes with loads of tedious and clichéd new subplots tacked in, like the one involving a would-be drug kingpin trying to murder and lie his way to the top in what feels like a network memo to have the show ape The Wire. There's also the tedious subplot about a corrupt cop's home life and his attempts to rehabilitate his delinquent daughter. I wonder why cable thrillers insist on subplots about a main character's boring and clichéd teenage daughter when the audience never gives a flying fuck about a character's teenage daughter… do the networks do market research to find that the brain-dead yokels who would never bother to watch their shows want to see subplots about unhappy teenage daughters (Homeland is another cable show that is strenuously losing viewers with that convention)?

Where the UK original was a fine example of Scottish Noir, the US remake just ends up a mediocre The Wire or wannabe. Where the UK original was elegant and lean in its storytelling, doling out revelations and twists with economy, the US remake is all noise and bluster, often signifying nothing. Pointless, wannabe-tough guy speeches are proffered by characters all the time in the US remake, trying to be metaphorical and profound but falling flat like damp squids because they were ultimately about nothing except hot air and filling space. There was no plot point the US remake didn't have characters making endless, repetitive speeches explaining it again and again as if afraid that stupid viewers wouldn't know what was going on. The US remake also didn't seem to understand the title of the show itself – the UK original was called LOW WINTER SUN because IT WAS SET IN WINTER! The US remake seemed to have been set in Summer, rendering its own title redundant!

This is a shame, because Mark Strong and Lennie James are two of my favourite British actors. Poor Lennie James was saddled with the worst, most pointless speeches in the whole show, and seemed to be encouraged to ham them up as much as possible in a futile attempt to make them sound profound. It's an interesting and surreal experiment to watch Strong play what's essentially the same character twice, but written differently each time. He came across as more sympathetic and emotionally vulnerable in the UK original, a basically decent man driven by love and doomed to spiral into Hell, while the US version took great pains to reveal him as a bigger and bigger bastard with a long history of bastard behaviour as the series grinds on, turning him into a solipsistic sociopath who's designed to lead a series should it last into more than one season. The US version of the character didn't even feel particularly true, more like someone cobbled together from memos in a cynical cable TV attempt to create a compelling bastard antihero made popular in shows like The Sopranos, The Shield, Breaking Bad and Sons of Anarchy. It made me hope the age of the bastard antihero was coming to an end because it's become a tiresome new cliché. Still, despite the show lurching deeper and deeper into clichéd mediocrity, it was actually a joy to watch Strong do what he does best in the show's penultimate hour as he goes into meltdown and has a tense, suicidal but oddly touching scene with his estranged ex-wife, played equally brilliantly by Jennifer Ehle. That still doesn't redeem the series, though.

The AMC remake of Low Winter Sun ran in the US alongside the final season of Breaking Bad but failed to hold onto the ratings that Walter White generated. There hasn't yet been any news whether it's been renewed for a second season and perhaps AMC will decide to quietly let it die if the numbers and revenue from sales don't pan out. It generated almost zero buzz and even on my Twitter feed, it was clear that the majority of people glued to Breaking Bad did not give a shit about Low Winter Sun, as if they could smell a mediocre product made by committee. Of course, this isn't the first time AMC screwed up remaking a good European show, the last time being their awful remake of The Killing, turning the show into a horrible, clichéd and mawkish cop series where the characters constantly acted like flaming idiots in order for the plot to happen.

So it's entirely possible the US remake might get renewed, but either way, it still buries the superior UK original in obscurity.

Remaking old columns at lookitmoves@gmail.com

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Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh

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