ScandoCrime, murder, art direction and scandavian interiors porn

Like many in the UK I'm hooked on Nordic crime dramas on the TV. The Killing, Arne Dahl, Wallander, Beck and best of all The Bridge.  The plots are great, the acting is amazing and it's pretty much always difficult to work out who did it before close to the end. But along with the plots and the acting is the design, both the production design in the way they're shot and, of course, those interiors. Almost nobody in a ScandoCrime drama seems to live in a house or apartment I don't want!

To take those in order, the production design is always wonderful, The Bridge has a great colour sense, muted palette pretty much throughout with Saga's car and coat sometimes the only splash of colour in the shot. Okay, with something as magnificent as the Oresund Bridge to keep using as the backdrop the visuals were always going to be something special though. There is also great use of the rural locations, either eerie empty birchwoods with treetrunks as far as the eye can see or vast open expanses of farmland or moor with nothing between you and the mountains on the horizon.

(image from https://burntretina.wordpress.com/2014/01/04/the-bridge-is-not-a-documentary/)

They also all seem to have wonderful kitchens, none of the pokey 'ready-meal focussed' kitchens of most UK detectives but airey open expanses of blonde wood and shiney worktops. Generally these lead through into living rooms full of bare floors, stylish furnishings and a feeling that somebody cared about how they looked. Well, okay, the production designer did care about how they looked but you get the feeling the characters do to. It's all about light and space, big windows letting the clear norther light stream into the rooms: okay so there's probably a nasty psychopath out there looking in through the windows but if I had that house there wouldn't be, alright? Even Beck, who lives alone in a city centre flat (and has strange oblique converstations with the old boy on the balcony next door) manages to have a living room you'd be happy to come home. And as for that amazing house with the long lounge/diningroom/kitchen Wallander has with huge windows looking out across the fjiord...

Why does nobody seem to praise the production designers?

TV, it's a visual medium right? 

So when we get a new series the critics and the public talk about the cast, and sometimes about who wrote it, but on the whole not about the production designers. Which given that they're the ones who make a program look as it does is just all wrong.. The 70s TV show 'The Fall Guy' used to have the tag line "I'm the unknown stuntman who makes Eastwood look so fine". There are equally unknown art and design folks who do the same for tv programs.

Go on, think of a show you love...name the stars....name the script writer....now name the production designers. Hey I can't do it either because by the time their names go by on the credits the writing is quite small and it's going by fast. At least with the advent of the special edition DVD there is now a chance that there's going to be a feature item on the production design so we not only get to see the people who make things look as they do but hear why. 

So this post is a shout out for the people who make our favourite programs look the way they do - so I'll go for two of my favourites

Musketeers - BBC, 2014 - production designer Will Hughes-Jones

Okay, so I'm not convinced that 17th century France really looked like that, though it might have been close, but every moment is lovely to look at. The colour palette is always right and brings out the light, and the costumes and hair (by Phoebe de Gaye and Anne Oldham respectively) are to die for!  I love this program.

Bron | | Broen (The Bridge) - 2014 - production designer Søren Gam (info from IMDB)

So monochrome (apart from the very occasional splashes of colour which make you realise just how monochrome it is) and yet so visually absorbing, like a great monochrome photograph. And the Oresund Bridge itself is such an amazing structure when it appears curving away in the background of shots. The show is also a delight for all devotees of Scandinavian Interiors, and which of us do not look at the interiors of apartments in Scandinavian dramas and not want to head for our nearest branch of Ikea :-)

So, let's hear it for the production designers, art directors and costume designers who make good tv look so brilliant!