Wallander

Wallander is a British television series that aired from 2008 to 2016. It was adapted from a Swedish series, based on the Swedish novelist Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander novels and starring Kenneth Branagh as the eponymous police inspector. It was the first time the Wallander novels have been adapted into an English-language production. Yellow Bird, a production company formed by Mankell, began negotiations with British companies to produce the adaptations in 2006. In 2007, Branagh met Mankell to discuss playing the role. Contracts were signed and work began on the films, adapted from the novels Sidetracked, Firewall and One Step Behind, in January 2008. Emmy-award-winning director Philip Martin was hired as lead director. Martin worked with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle to establish a visual style for the series. The first three-episode series, produced by Yellow Bird, Left Bank Pictures and TKBC for BBC Scotland, was broadcast on BBC One from November to December 2008. The second series was filmed from July to October 2009 and was broadcast in January 2010. The third series was filmed in the summer of 2011 in Ystad, Scania, Sweden, and Riga, Latvia, and aired in July 2012. The fourth and final series was shot from October 2014 to January 2015 and premiered on German TV, dubbed into German, in December 2015. The final series aired in the original English on BBC One in May 2016. Critics have written positively of the series, which has won a Broadcasting Press Guild Award (Best Actor for Branagh) and six British Academy Television Awards, including Best Drama Series. Characters The series is based on Kurt Wallander (Branagh), a detective and police inspector in the small town of Ystad, Sweden. Branagh describes Wallander as "an existentialist who is questioning what life is about and why he does what he does every day, and for whom acts of violence never become normal. There is a level of empathy with the victims of crime that is almost impossible to contain, and one of the prices he pays for that sort of empathy is a personal life that is a kind of wasteland." In the novels, Wallander regularly listens to opera in his apartment and his car. This signature hobby has been dropped for this adaptation; producer Francis Hopkinson believes it would make Wallander too similar to Inspector Morse, whose love of opera is already familiar to British viewers.