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The US version of the hit crime series begins effectively enough – but it’s haunted by the ghost of the Danish original When it was announced that AMC, the channel behind Mad Men, was making an American version of The Killing, my first reaction was: Why? Even if they believed Americans incapable of watching a subtitled a show, surely US television bosses couldn’t hope to capture the spirit of Forbrydelsen, with its lengthy pauses and satisfyingly complicated, slow-burning storylines, Wouldn’t a US version soften Sarah Lund’s sharp edges, trying to make this most dysfunctional of heroines more likeable? And – most importantly of all – what would happen to the knitwear? Fans of the latter can rest assured. The jumpers are still present – although Lund has become Linden, the murdered girl is now Rosie Larsen and we’re are in Seattle, the only place in America as wet as The Killing’s Copenhagen. There are other changes too – Veena Sud, the show’s executive producer, has compared the US version to jazz: “We get to riff off a really beautiful piece, but we tell our own story” – the biggest difference of all being that the killer and the motive are apparently completely different. That’s perhaps understandable in our spoiler-ridden internet age. But it’s also a pretty risky move, as anyone who sat through the US remake of Life on Mars, only to be confronted with an ending so laughably ridiculous that it practically induced retinal bleeding, could tell you. The US Killing is unlikely to collapse in quite the same way, although its worth noting that one of the most satisfying things about the original was that the killer not only made sense, the clues as to why had been carefully sewn from the beginning. There is one other change, which concerns Linden’s character: according to Sud, Linden is hiding a secret. It’s a tired plot device that seems unlikely to illuminate the character. Much of the power of Forbrydelsen lay in Lund – a tightly wound woman unable to communicate with those closest to her – and how she differed from the standard TV cop. By contrast Linden, although still contemplative and aloof, is much more like the driven female cops on US TV that we’re used to seeing from The Closer to Saving Grace. It comes as no surprise to discover that Sud was also executive producer of Cold Case. So given the differences, is the remake actually any good? It’s been ecstatically reviewed in the US and it’s true that the first episode is compelling, clever television with a good performance from Big Love’s Mireille Enos as Linden and a particularly powerful turn from Michelle Forbes as the missing girl’s mother, now named Mitch. That said, it’s hard to judge the show as an original piece of work, not least because the first two episodes stick pretty closely to the original, establishing the story and introducing us to the different, interconnecting strands. It’s also arguable that, good as the Danish version is, at least half of the joy of the programme derived from it being set in a world that was alien to British viewers, who enjoyed pronouncing the names, staring at the gloomy scenery and attempting to unravel the intricacies of a different political and police system. By contrast the American police procedural is so ingrained in our cultural experience that AMC’s version has to work twice as hard to capture its audience and make them believe they are seeing something we haven’t seen countless times before. In this it is largely successful: the pace is slower than your average US cop drama, the dialogue less forced, and the characterisation strong. If I hadn’t seen the original then I would be phoning people up to speculate as to who the killer might be – which is just what the Americans with whom I watched the first episode were doing. The problem is that, like everyone else who has been glued to BBC4 for the past few weeks, I have seen the original and it’s impossible not to think of it when watching the new version. And while Sarah Linden is a smart, interesting and pretty believable cop, at this (admittedly early) stage in the game she’s no Sarah Lund. The Killing Television US television Sarah Hughes guardian.co.uk