There are rumors that AMC is reconsidering.) By the time the second season aired, that November, the audience had more than doubled. The show, which ran for two seasons on AMC, was recently cancelled, even though Robert Caro mentioned in an interview that he enjoyed taping it on Sunday evenings. (American TV executives preferred to go the remake route, transferring Detective Lund to Seattle, and renaming her Sarah Linden. Almost four hundred thousand British viewers watched the first episode of the first season-in Danish, with subtitles. In early 2011, BBC 4 aired “The Killing,” the big show of the previous few years in Denmark, where it is called “Forbrydelsen.” The BBC was, of course, drafting on the recent success of noirish northern fare such as “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” (There is a whole genre of Scandinavian crime novel, featuring a kick-ass heroine, known as femikrimi.) But Danish television was an unknown quantity.

A “How Danish Are You?” quiz asked, “You like your skies a) Blue b) Slate grey c) Slate grey with vultures circling the carrion of slaughtered youth.” It further probed the pronunciation of the letter “ø” and the plot of “Thumbelina.” The sort of Brit who used to wear driving loafers and say “ ciao” is now into knits and “ tak.”ĭanish television is particularly in vogue. Not long ago, the Times of London published an article examining “why everyone wants to be Danish.” It covered Danish society (according to scientists, Danes are the world’s happiest people), Danish fashion (“a leather trim here, a matelot stripe and an edgy trilby there”), Danish décor (“Go monochrome”), and Danish sperm donation (last year, more than five hundred British women were artificially inseminated in Denmark-an ad for one clinic read, “Congratulations, it’s a Viking!”). To Brits, Danes are exotic, but, as one Dane told me recently, “not, like, Hawaii-pineapple exotic.” Brits can relate to Danes, while finding them novel. Did someone herd some countries into a closet and order them to spin the bottle? But, just as France and Japan share an affinity for good food, judo, and wrapping paper, Britain and Denmark have in common seafaring, drinking, and execrable weather. At first, such nation-crushes can be perplexing.

Like the japonisme-obsessed French of the late nineteenth century, the British have become infatuated with all things Danish. When people ask what’s going on in London these days, I answer, Copenhagen. She brandished it, cackling, “It was me all along!” At one point, Camilla got hold of Gråbøl’s prop gun.

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