It’s cold and wintry, so what are you going to watch? Let me argue for the Nordics. They were right all along, I think, these stoic people of the snow series. Staring into clouds of white, stubbornly unhappy, but somewhat fatalistic in a way that helps them survive. Of course, this description likely bears no relationship to any real-life place you’d call “Nordic” (I’ve never been to any of them … the closest I’ve come is Ireland, which has the same historic relation to Nordic peoples as tarmac does to a steamroller). But it’s my chosen stereotype, gleaned from endless hours watching Nordic Noir and Nordic Noir-adjacent shows, full of sad men and women for whom heaven and earth must be moved to wrench a weary smile from their hard visages. Oh, and they catch criminals too. Mostly weird sex fiends or child murderers. Sometimes a combination of the two. And it’s always cold, and it’s always snowing. That’s key.
These detectives usually wind up inhabiting their grim mindsets because of personal hardship, but regardless, their general perspective to be the correct one. It’s the ideal we should have all been pursuing from the start: standing upright before the wall of white, expecting nothing good but soldiering on anyway.
So while you’re sitting at home this winter season dreaming of better times, I can think of nothing better to watch than SNOW NOIR. Fight your way to that mental zone, and believe me, nothing can touch you.
Here are a few recommendations from around the snow globe—some might be very familiar, but hopefully there are a few new ones in the mix.
Canada: Cardinal
Here be snow. Here be BIG snow. It’s also a really solid detective show out of a land where people in real life are too nice to commit crimes. Not so in the show, which finds John Cardinal (played with excellent world-weariness by Billy Campbell) teaming up with Lisa Delorme (Karine Vanasse)—a multi-dimensional woman, which is not always a given in crime shows—to hunt down a killer and his own demons amid a frigid landscape where even the trees (birch, exclusively) are white. For solitary winter TV watching on a forgettable holiday, this is a must.
Finland: Deadwind
It’s time to honor the Finns, a snow-bound people who gave the massive army of the Soviet Union fits with an army of dudes on skis. (This is basically true.) For this one, you must love subtitles, but if you can bear that (or if you speak Finnish), Sofia Karppi is a great addition to the lineage of badass Scandinavian women detectives, following the likes of Sarah Lund (The Killing) and Saga Noren (The Bridge). She’s a widow returning to work after the death of her husband, and with three seasons of that slow-but-compelling hard-bitten darkness the genre does so well, you can really dig our teeth into this one.
Iceland: Trapped
Available to purchase on Amazon Prime
Did you know that Iceland is more green than Greenland, and Greenland is way more icy than Iceland? That bit of useless trivia did not stop Trapped from going full snow-crazy in its tremendous first season, and unlike Cardinal, the snow here is not a silent, oppressive kind, but a swirling, windy, aggressive snow. The drama begins with a headless corpse, and if you like good mysteries with big bearded Icelandic dudes and shots of a boat skipping through cold water in a snowstorm, you have come to the right place. (Note: Once you’ve watched the first two seasons, be sure to check out the third, titled Entrapped, which is streaming on Netflix but features less snow.) Iceland honorable mention: The Valhalla Murders. Really the second big Icelandic breakout after Trapped, and almost as good.
