I sat down to watch Low Winter Sun
recently. I had high hopes for the show. I had seen the original
version. That one was set in Edinburgh, Scotland. I thought that the
original was one of the better shows I had seen. It was filled with
creative plot twists that kept me wondering. So, when AMC broadcast
their version, I thought that it might be good. It's not. In fact,
it's terrible. I think the problem is that the Scottish version was
two episodes, totaling about three and a half hours. The AMC version
is ten episodes, each forty-five minutes long. Clearly, the AMC
version was going to need some filler. The writers kept the original
story but grafted on an absurd companion tale. This subplot involved
some would-be gangsters stealing cocaine from a crime boss and blah,
blah, blah. You've seen this a million times. When you take a tight,
three-hour story and try to make it open-ended, the quality has to
suffer. That's what happened here.
What most intrigued me, I think, about
the new Low Winter Sun, was that it was set in Detroit. It featured
homicide detectives. That sounds pretty familiar to me. I wanted to
see how the director would depict the City as well as the detectives.
I think they were pretty good about showing the decrepit Detroit
Police Headquarters. They got the “ruin porn” down, as well. But
that's not complicated. All they had to do was stop anywhere in the
City and get some B Roll footage. Detroit did all the hard work. With
a smart phone, you could go to Detroit and shoot evocative images of
decay. One thing that Low Winter Sun really missed on was the race
issue. I presume they wanted a mostly-white cast for ratings
purposes. But, this seems at odds with reality. That said, race is
very hard to deal with. I, myself, avoided it almost entirely.
I could not help thinking what Heroes
or Smoke would look like on film. It might bear some resemblance to
what the new Low Winter Sun looks like. But I would hope that a film
version would get a lot more of the details right. I would be
delighted if Heroes and Smoke and Exile (and the others I have yet to
publish) made it onto the big screen. The actors in Low Winter Sun,
especially Mark Strong, could do the project nicely. I see Strong as
Christopher Garvin more than George Hofmann.
If you have not yet seen the AMC
version of Low Winter Sun, do yourself a favor and skip it. Seek out
the original. That is a superb story well told.
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