Okay, it is not ‘new’ as the television series has 4 seasons released on home media but it is ‘new’ to me so I am sticking with the post’s title.

The Bridge is a Swedish/Danish co-production centered on investigations that bridge the nations of Sweden and Denmark. Its protagonist is Saga Noren a Swedish homicide investigator. Saga is brilliant but socially awkward and many viewers feel, though it has not been confirmed, that her character exist along the Autism spectrum.

The first season opens with the lights on the bridge between the Swedish City of Malmo and the Danish capitol of Copenhagen going out and in the intervening darkness, an unknown person leaves the corpse of a murdered woman on the bridge with half in Swedish jurisdiction and half in the Danish.

Murder mysteries tend to fall into two major camps, one centered on realistic portrayals of murders and investigators grounded in ruthless reality and the other focused on hyper-competent detectives facing villains of extraordinary brilliance and skill. The Bridge belongs to the latter category. While Saga’s partners and associates are not presented as bumbling like Holmes’ Lestrade often is portrayed, she exists on a different level of skill and talent. Likewise, the murderer of season one possesses a keen brilliance and has made detailed plans for nearly every contingency years ahead of their plot. If you go into The Bridgelooking for gritty realism, while the story and themes are grounds in societal ills, the execution is less concerned with realism than twist and reveals in the plot.

Sadly, The Bridge is not currently streaming anywhere available to the USA. My sweetie-wife who wanted to see the series after reading about it purchased season 1-4 on the UK Blu-ray release and we have been watching it that way.