"The Killing: Season One"

This is something recommended by my colleagues and boy, did I had hard time with this TV serial.

I found it so dark, gloomy, unpleasant and altogether heavy that it became a chore rather than a pleasure - after all, we watch TV serials not for the sake of sadomasochism but because we are interested - well in this case I really did NOT enjoy it at all and each time had to force myself to watch another episode, at the end I just wanted to get over with it and be done.

Considering the honest excitement of my young work colleagues who were following it night after night, I actually asked myself what's wrong with me - apparently they loved it - and to be absolutely honest to myself, it might be that at my age I had already seen too many TV serials with similar themes: female detective, forensics digging under the fingernails of the victim (young girl, of course), thousands of suspects where each and one of them is hiding some secret, soap bubbles growing on and on and on. This is American version of celebrated Danish original but I can only focus on what I got here - American version - and not that actors or even scripts are bad, on contrary, acting was very strong (specially grieving parents, family and school friends of a victim) however at this point it seems I am a bit over the whole idea of crime-as-entertainment , I simply dislike watching another TV show where people cry, suffer, kill each other and detectives dig under someone's fingernails, I have seen too many of those and had enough of them. There is a point where I just don't find it neither entertaining nor amusing and don't want this to be my choice of how to spend evening - friends tease me that I had mellowed with age beyond recognition and it might be so, I rather think it has to do with conscious decision not to accept whatever just because it has been served in media. There is so much violence and brutality everywhere, served as entertainment that I need to keep it away from me - honestly I don't think its even healthy to watch too many of shows like these - besides, we have already seen story like this covered many years ago in "Twin Peaks" where everything was focused on murder of a young girl. So my conclusion is, this can only be exciting to my much younger colleagues who don't know better. I managed to go trough the first season - very reluctantly - forcing myself each time to go and watch another episode where someone cries and rain constantly pours, not a trace of sunny skies in this series. As I finished the last episode, I sighed in relief and won't even think about continuing with second season.