Meanwhile, the central character charged with solving these crimes, Detective Kurt Wallander (Branagh), seems like a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown - only he's too clinically depressed to summon the energy for a full-blown emotional collapse. At the end of that first scene with the teenage girl's self-immolation, Wallander literally starts to tremble as he stands alone in the field of yellow, and you instantly comprehend how emotionally fragile and battered he is. And, by the way, Branagh communicates all that inner torment with hardly a word - just the full use of his body as an instrument playing the scales of psychic pain.
The theme here is one of inner and outer chaos - Wallander is a postmodern, post-apocalyptic cop drama set in the land of existential angst. It's not for everybody, but neither was Bergman.
"What kind of world are we leaving for a 15-year-old girl that she would burn herself to death?" Wallander wonders aloud late at night in the morgue, giving voice to one of the central questions of the pilot and the series. It's the kind of question someone losing his or her faith asks of an absent God. Only, you're pretty sure Wallander lost his faith long ago - if he ever had any.
In the end, what ultimately makes Wallander special is Branagh. There is simply no one with this kind of acting chops anywhere on American TV - spare me your soliloquies on behalf of HBO. Gabriel Byrne is great on In Treatment, but he is not in this league, believe me.
Based on the first three episodes made available for screening, this is Branagh's vehicle from beginning to end. The camera shoots Branagh like a movie star, rarely leaving him out of the frame, constantly exploring - no, crawling all over - his face as it visits the shadows and plumbs the depths of this troubled, but principled character. Be warned: Branagh looks like hell - red-eyed, paunchy and always unshaven.
"These are our lives. And they're fragile, precarious, miraculous," this homicide investigator says. "They're all we have."
It might sound shocking to hear someone say this in these downsized days of diminished expectations, but here is a new series with the potential to be as important a part of viewers' lives as anything from the so-called good old days when giants like Inspector Morse and Jane Tennyson were solving crimes on PBS. That's not something I can say for any other new TV series this season.
on tv
Masterpiece-Mystery! airs 10 p.m. Sunday on MPT, Channel 22, and WETA, Channel 26.
