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.
[6] Wallander's team at the Ystad police station is made up of: Anne-Britt Hoglund (Smart), Kalle Svedberg (Beard) and Magnus Martinsson (Hiddleston).
Actors proposed to play Wallander were Trevor Eve, Neil Pearson, Jason Isaacs, David Morrissey, Clive Owen and Michael Gambon.
Yellow Bird was contracted as a co-producer, working with Left Bank Pictures, a production house formed in 2007 by former ITV Controller of Comedy, Drama and Film Andy Harries.
[10] Philip Martin was hired as lead director of the series, and met with Branagh, Harries and Left Bank producer Francis Hopkinson in January.
[15] Half of that came from the BBC, and the rest from pre-sale co-production funding from American WGBH Boston and German ARD Degeto, and a tax deduction for filming in Sweden.
[34] On 21 July, the portions of road 1015 passing by the Karlsfält Farmland Estate north of Ystad was closed from 11 p.m. until midnight to accommodate the film crew.
[43] Local politicians supported and invested 8,000,000 Swedish kronor (roughly £750,000) in the second Wallander series through Film i Skåne, a regional resource and production centre.
Fredrik Gunnarsson features in Faceless Killers as Valfrid Strom, Gunnarson appears in 17 episodes of Yellow Bird's Swedish language TV series as uniformed police officer Svartman.
[45] According to Yellow Bird producer Daniel Ahlqvist, An Event in Autumn is about how "Kurt tries to take charge of his own life by getting a new house but gets interrupted and is more or less forced back to his job".
They later signed on to support the production by other means such as letting BBC and Yellow Bird use Ystad Studios for free, worth about half a million Swedish Krona.
[75] The first episode, The White Lioness, is written by James Dormer (Strike Back, Outcast), and directed by Benjamin Caron (Tommy Cooper: Not Like That, Like This, Skins, My Mad Fat Diary).
Returning cast include Jeany Spark as Linda Wallander, Richard McCabe as Nyberg, Barnaby Kay as Lennart Mattson, and Ingeborga Dapkunaite as Baiba Liepa.
The tax funded entities Ystad-Österlens filmfond and Film i Skåne have put three million Swedish kronor into the production according to Sveriges Radio.
[78] The new series was shot on several locations surrounding Ystad, including Mossbystrand, Östra Hoby, Vårhallen Beach, Tunbyholm Castle plus Blekinge Province and the Danish island of Zealand.
[88] A public screening of Sidetracked was given by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts on 10 November 2008, and was followed by a question-and-answer session with Philip Martin and Kenneth Branagh.
[8][92][93] The series has already been sold to 14 countries and territories across the world, including TV4 Sweden, TV2 Norway, DR Denmark, MTV3 Finland, France on Arte, Canada, Slovenia, Australia, Poland, Lumiere Benelux and Svensk Film for its pan Scandinavian feed.
[97] In advance of the broadcast, Branagh and WGBH Boston's Rebecca Eaton presented a screening of an episode at The Paley Center for Media on 29 April.
[101] Previewing Sidetracked, The Times's David Chater called Branagh "superb as Kurt Wallander", and the series "one of those superior cop shows in which the character of the detective matters more than the plot".
[102] In a feature in The Knowledge, a supplement of The Times, Paul Hoggart called Branagh's performance "understated, ruminative, warm, sensitive and depressed" and wrote positively of the design and cinematography and concluded by writing that "Wallander is that rare treasure: a popular form used for intelligent, thoughtful, classy drama and superbly shot".
[103] Reviewing Sidetracked after it aired, Tom Sutcliffe for The Independent called it, "often a visually dazzling experience, the camerawork as attentive to the contours of Branagh's stubbly, despairing face as it was to the Swedish locations in which the action took place or the bruised pastels of a Munch sunset".
[105] In The Daily Telegraph, James Walton was disappointed with the revelation that the crimes stemmed from sexual abuse; "once quite a daring TV subject, now a rather clichéd short cut to the black recesses of the human heart".
Walton, like others, was complimentary of Branagh, and concluded by writing, "The series still probably won't appeal to fans of Heartbeat, but if you fancy an undoubtedly classy antidote to the cosy cop show, you could do a lot worse.
[110] In The Guardian, Sam Wollaston wrote, "with the greyness, the cold, the Scandinavian sadness, and a troubled Kenneth Branagh mooching around in the gloom trying to figure out who killed these people so horribly, it's all pretty perfect.
[115] On TV Scoop website, John Beresford wrote that the episode "went quickly downhill" from the murder of the taxi driver in the opening minutes; "Pedestrian plots, characters that wander aimlessly about with next to nothing to do or say, and a format that seems better fitted for radio than it is for television.
By that I mean the endless shots where there's a someone on the left of the screen, someone on the right, and they stand there for hours tal...king...verrrry...slow...ly to each other with absolutely nothing else happening.
He emphasised that not only was Branagh's performance of higher quality than the current Swedish Wallander actor Krister Henriksson, but the BBC series really understood how to use the nature and environment of the Skåne province to tell the proper story and added that, as a person from southern Sweden, he recognised all the settings and they had never looked as beautiful as in this production.
[125][126] In May 2009, PBS distributed promotional DVDs of One Step Behind to members of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for nomination consideration at the 61st Primetime Emmy Awards.
[133] The Hollywood Foreign Press Association nominated Branagh for the Golden Globe Award for Best Miniseries or Television Film for his performance in One Step Behind.
Johnson reports that in the past British people were reluctant to visit Sweden since they saw the country as cold and expensive, but now questions are mostly about the light and the nature seen in the BBC series.