4 out of 5

Created by: Kasper Barfoed

You gain a lot of credit with me when you don’t cheat.  Cheating – in my TV show parlance – often involves withheld information: offscreen, or otherwise “this person knows but has pretended not to” info that ‘cheats’ a reveal down the road.  Such stuff can make for an acceptable single view, but it cheapens things once the curtain has drawn back, generally making repeat viewings pointless, and to those who start considering the What If or Why questions such reveals prompt, generally tarnishes the entire lead-up to the reveal.  Letting us, the viewer, understand things in time with the characters not only allows for a more genuine ramping up of things – as we’re responding in time with our on-screen parallels – but (possibly) circumvents the other mentioned flaws, even possibly making second or third viewings stronger when you consider what a character’s motivations mean before and after you’re aware of What’s Really Going On.

For much of Below the Surface, I was really, really wary of a cheat.  It’s the kind of show that’s bred for it: 15 hostages are taken from a stopped metro ‘neath the streets of Denmark by masked, English speaking men, and led into a defensible section of the tunnels that’s been outfitted (by our kidnappers) for this situation.  They demand money, but their are enough oddities with the setup to suggest that there’s more to it; the hostage negotiator leading the good guy team has haunted dreams from when he himself was a hostage in Syria and there are hinted-at connections with our current crop of kidnappers; and just logistically, the show’s one-day-per-episode cadence means some nonsense has to go down in order to stretch things out to eight days.

I waited for the shoe to drop.  But there was no cheat.  Or rather, there was, but our talented crew of writers didn’t make that the point: it’s a layer of things, very much superseded by other concerns that, as idealized above, we discover in time with everyone else.  It’s a very clever way of faking us out, and it also doubled-down on an emotional backdrop which really deepened lead Johannes Lassen’s performance.

The show’s editing is a bit odd, with a rather non-traditional sense of pre-ad breaks and non-cliffhangers, which can maybe be added up to it being a foreign production or that I viewed it on a streaming platform (Hulu), and it doesn’t fully escape the hiccups of serialization: we fill some time with Lost-y flashbacks to help us get to know the hostages that I’m not convinced were entirely necessary – though to the show’s credit this element isn’t over-utilized – and given the way things turn out, we don’t quite get enough explanation on why everyone was involved.  We can assume, but it’s still enough of a grey area to allows us to ponder.

However, much like the non-cheaty cheat, these elements are backgrounded to a very compelling, logical foreground.  The police’s approach feels realistic; the government’s urging of the police to do something (but of course unable to stress what that something to be) similarly so; the public’s response and the reporter who gets contacted by the kidnappers – Paprika Steen – are also used well to tell the story, and not get in the way with forced conflict.  Below the Surface is thus not only quality event TV, making you hit play on the next episode out of pure desire to know what happens next, but also a quality story, which gives it a very impressive rewatch value and gives its entire cast and crew a lot of material to work with, and work with well.