"Wallander" Starring the Brooding Branagh, or, Stop With the PC Cop Shows Already!

Mean Pete doesn't normally watch much television at night.  He's usually too busy formatting e-books, shaking his fist at the neighbor kids from his deck, or drinking beer and rereading Mickey Spillane paperbacks.  But dangit if he didn't start enjoying this WALLANDER mystery series starring Kenneth Branagh as a brooding Swedish police detective.

But Mean Pete doesn't think he can stomach it anymore.  Not after tonight when the "broodingness" of the character was brought up about 12 times too often and, then, after a fairly harrowing show in which Wallander's female partner ends up in a coma after being clubbed in the head by a crazy Swedish redneck wielding a sledge hammer, Wallander's wife hauls him off to counseling to discuss his feelings.

Yep, that's how this otherwise fairly riveting show ends--with Wallander's wife hauling him to a shrink to open up and spill his guts out on the floor like a griz sow giving birth.

I'm sorry, but today's PC cop shows have Mean Pete mad as hell!

What happened to the days when ole Mannix would gun down seventeen bad guys armed with only his snub-nosed Midnight Special and a checked leisure suit in the grand finale, and then, after losing his best friend on the police force to a car bomb, gets drunk in a sleazy '70's-style bar decked out with aquariums and red naugahyde only to stumble off with the first blonde floozy who buys him a gin fizz?

That's how real men--at least REAL FICTIONALLY HEROIC MEN handle the tragedies in life!  They get drunk and they get laid, in that order.  Not hauled off to some doe-eyed shrink by their simpering wives!

And as an aside to all the aspiring writers out there, especially to the writers of WALLANDER if you're reading this which you should be--it's best to not have your other characters, much less the main character himself, discuss overmuch his broodingness and solitariness.  It's always best to have your brooding solitary character just be brooding and solitary and shut the fudge sickle up about it already!

And send him home at the end of the show, beaten and bloody and in the arms of a hot floozy!

Does Mean Pete have to tell you how to do everything?!