I just saw the first episode of Catch and Release, a new Norwegian Nordic noir series by Kristine Berg and Arne Berggren, the team who made Outlier, which I saw on Acorn via Prime Video and very much liked and reviewed here this past August. Catch and Release is currently airing in Norway, and should be up on Acorn in 2022. I'll definitely watch and review the rest of the series as soon as that happens.
Like Outlier, it's a very different kind of suspense thriller. The protagonist is an elderly former police woman, Irja Lantto, who has left the force because she has only weeks or a month of so left to live. In fact, she's putting a gun to head, to end her life right there and then, when she hears the sirens of a police car. They're on the way to investigate the murder of a man who was fishing in the clear waters of Norway.
Of course, the current police would rather Irja go home and rest (i.e., die) rather than be troubled by her investigating the murder, but she'll have none of that. And in this first episode, we see there is plenty to investigate, including people with all kinds of problems in all kinds of situations. Near the end, we also learn that there's a man who lives deep in the woods, who tells Irja that there's some kind of inchoate evil afoot.
The last TV series about an elderly investigator that I recall was Barnaby Jones, in which Buddy Ebsen played Barnaby from 1973-1980 on CBS. That show was one of the pillars of my "defective detective" theory of television back then, in which I noticed that just about every detective on television had some kind of physical problem: Barnaby was old, Longstreet was blind, Ironside was in a wheelchair, etc. The hero (or anti-hero, still a little early to tell) of Catch and Release would fit right in with that group, and in fact Irja will likely give a more profound accounting of herself.
I'll be back here with a review of rest, as soon as I see it.
