The Chestnut Man

Mikkel Serup's The Chestnut Man launched on Netflix in September 2021, adapted from Søren Sveistrup's 2018 novel of the same name. Sveistrup had previously created The Killing, the show that established Danish noir as a global category in the early 2010s, and the eight-episode Chestnut Man brought him back to television in a streaming-era register. The series became one of Netflix's biggest international-language hits of its release week.

Copenhagen detective Naia Thulin (Danica Curcic) and Europol special agent Mark Hess (Mikkel Følsgaard) are paired on a series of brutal murders that share an unsettling signature: a small man made of chestnuts left at the scene. The case appears to connect to the year-old disappearance of the daughter of social-affairs minister Rosa Hartung (Iben Dorner). The series moves between the procedural investigation, the political pressure on the missing-girl case, and a backstory in rural Jutland involving foster-care abuse, with the two detectives gradually exposed as personally implicated.

The series sits in the lineage of The Killing and The Bridge, with the genre's now-mature combination of slow-burn pacing, weather-dominated mood, and a willingness to let the case extend over the entirety of an ensemble's emotional life. Serup directs four of the eight episodes; the visual register is tighter and chillier than the original Sveistrup show.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: Sveistrup's return to television in a streaming format, and one of the best Nordic noir series of recent years. A reminder that procedural television, in capable hands, can still be the form in which we work through what frightens us.