The Crow Girl on Paramount+ review: this Bristol crime thriller is as bleak and harsh as a Nordic winter
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Just when the TV market seems like it’s approaching a Scandi noir saturation point, along comes a drama that makes you fall for the genre all over again – even if it has relocated the original Swedish story to the West Country. Enter The Crow Girl: a series that is as dark, chilly and foreboding as a Nordic winter, with the camera filters to match. Bristol has never looked so unappealing – set in the depths of winter, it’s been transformed from a vibrant city into warren of bleak streets, where a serial killer could lurk around any corner.
This new Paramount+ drama series has been adapted from the book of the same name by Eric Axl Sund (actually the pen name of Swedish writers Jerker Erikson and Håkan Axlander Sundquist). As such, our protagonists have been Anglicised along with the location: our hero, Jeanette Kihlberg, is now DCI Jeanette Kilburn, played with a potty mouth and lashings of impatience by Keeping Faith’s Eve Myles.
Jeanette is devoted to her son, Jo-jo, but she’s more devoted to her job, running out of the front door at all hours of the day to pursue cases – and putting considerable strain on her marriage with husband Alex (Raphael Sowole). And wouldn’t you know it, soon the mother of all cases lands in her lap: the body of a young boy turns up, stuffed inside a rubbish bin, outside the home of disgraced dentist Carl Lowry (Trevor White). Carl’s been arrested following allegations of paedophilia, but Jeanette’s convinced he’s connected to the dead body, too.
