The Tunnel: Sabotage: channel mystery leaves The Bridge behind

The second series of Anglo-French police drama The Tunnel is truly a corker, and less beholden to The Bridge.

Clemence Poesy and Stephen Dillane in a scene from The Tunnel: Sabotage

If you are still partial to viewing free-to-air television for your entertainment, you may have noticed that as the Rio Olympics pass into the ether the networks have become dominated by brassy reality-TV formats. What’s interesting is they originate elsewhere, sometimes crossing many borders, the product honed to within an inch of its life. As the critic Jean Chalaby points out in his recent book The Format Age, hundreds of programs are adapted across the world at any one time and this recent ideas revolution has largely bypassed scripted entertainment.

The reason is pretty obvious: it takes not merely talent but good fortune to capture the essence of a drama or comedy, redefine it somehow without losing its actuality, and make it work in another culture.

One drama that seems to have cracked it is the Scandinavian cop show The Bridge, created and written by Hans Rosenfeldt and reimagined by British writer Ben Richards. Yet we have had to wait until the second series, The Tunnel: Sabotage, to see it actually fully translated in artistic terms.

It started this week on the ABC (you can catch up on iView if you missed the first episode), and it really is a cracker of a show, one you can watch without having to constantly compare it with the original, both in your head and rudely out loud. It proves beyond doubt that a classic in its own land really can travel and is not necessarily culturally sensitive, and that a kind of knowledge transfer is possible.

The Bridge, which originally aired on SBS, is a murder mystery that brings two cops, Swedish police detective Saga Noren (Sofia Helin) and her Danish counterpart Martin Rohde (Kim Bodnia), together over a dead body discovered on the Oresund Bridge connecting Malmo and Copenhagen, cut in half and perfectly position between the two cities. They initially struggle over command until they realise they can each lay claim to separate halves of what turns out to be two victims.

It’s a devilishly clever idea and such a juicy starting point. Cleverly combining the police procedural with the escapist thriller, Rosenfeldt creates something quite original. Not only was it a joint production in terms of creative input and financing between Sveriges Television and Danmarks Radio but was written and directed in both Swedish and Danish, and went to air simultaneously in both countries.

It was a brilliant example of the way a great crime writer can plunge us into a believable type of excitement, invoking a kind of temporary sense of fear and uncertainty about the fate of a character we care about. And Rosenfeldt is brilliant at devising ways to maintain a complex intellectual suspense that a dangerous criminal might remain at large or that innocent people might be convicted of the crime at the centre of his narrative. There is little reassurance. The suspense so powerful because we are never sure how it will work out, or if he may suddenly depart from the basic conventions of the formulaic narrative universe. This is the key, I think, to this kind of perversely enjoyable escapism.

Rosenfeldt’s original series spawned two remakes in 2013. First, Meredith Stiehm, who had previously created the elegantly configured Cold Case, and writer Elwood Reid’s The Bridge premiered on FX in the US in July, then Sky Atlantic and Canal+ took viewers through The Tunnel in October.

The American version worked a treat on many levels, though initially the producers planned to reproduce the bleak Nordic landscapes, setting the story between Canada and the US. But, realising the essence of the drama for them concerned the cultural differences between the police forces of an affluent country versus a developing one, they transferred the story to the US-Mexico border. The two cops from different jurisdictions investigated a string of murders along the border, where illegal immigration, drug trafficking, violent murder and prostitution are rife. It worked well, I thought, the narco trafficking adding an even darker undertone, though there were sometimes irritating plot devices that reminded you of what you had already seen in the original.

The Anglo-French version, The Tunnel, set between England and France, saw French investigator Elise Wassermann (Clemence Poesy) and British detective Karl Roebuck (Stephen Dillane) thrown together in an uneasy agreement as they attempted to track down a killer who left the upper-half of the body of a French politician and the lower-half of a British prostitute in the Channel Tunnel. As in the original they learn that the killer — nicknamed the Truth Terrorist — is on a moral crusade to highlight many social problems, terrorising both countries in the process

The first series, though extremely well made with a lovely cinematic gloss, became increasingly exasperating as it quickly became apparent it was almost a shot-for-shot remake of the original, the plot points and their complicated twists and turns easy to guess, along with the interactions between the two lead characters.

What we didn’t know was that the series was conceived well before the original The Bridge became a cult hit around the world, and before it was even screened in Britain. It was too easy to disdain writer Richards — behind both series of Sky Atlantic’s Anglo-French thriller — but he was working under a misapprehension.

When he was first commissioned to adapt the Nordic crime drama, it was unknown outside its homeland. “I was always a bit aggrieved about that afterwards,” he says. “Nobody had heard of The Bridge — so we thought, why don’t we adapt this? It’s great, and nobody’s ever going to see it …”

In this country we were well infatuated with so-called Nordic noir by the time The Tunnel’s first season arrived, and it seemed, initially at least, like a cheap rip-off — which of course it wasn’t, the fine casting and direction quickly asserting themselves. Yet the sense of deja vu was a little overwhelming.

This is not a problem with the second season, which aired in Britain in April. Its debut was put back a week following the Brussels terrorist attacks on March 22, as the new series starts with director Mike Barker’s brilliantly staged attack on a British airliner.

Interestingly, the series is receiving little promotion from the ABC, which understandably is concentrating on its own slate of classy crime dramas. But Richard’s work is a masterclass in TV crime writing.

Richard’s story this time is a highly original one, the relationship between his two dysfunctional and highly empathetic cops the engine of its success, and the essence of the story easily, well, bridging countries. It superbly illustrates the extent to which the formats of scripted dramas require fuller cultural translations than non-scripted reality programs.

The Tunnel: Sabotage is set a year after the death of Roebuck’s son at the hands of the self-styled Truth Terrorist, the cop having joined the Public Protection Unit to help special victims — though already, according to his wife, thinking of rejoining the CID.

Wassermann has recently been promoted to commander and takes charge of her unit following the departure of her former boss, Olivier Pujol (Thibault de Montalembert). As we meet her again, she is taking management courses in leadership, something her troops view with a degree alarm. She’s living with a boyfriend, though perplexed by the way he sometimes talks when she doesn’t want him to. But while direct and blunt, she appears more agreeable this time, more curious about life, and smiles more readily.

Of course she’s still the first to recognise a weapon when no one else can, her brain forensically focused on detection. She and Roebuck are awkwardly reunited after a gang kidnaps French couple Madeleine (Marie Dompnier) and Robert Fournier (Johan Heldenbergh) on a Channel Tunnel train, their traumatised young daughter Chloe (Eloise Graves) left behind. Both parents appear to be involved professionally in counter-terrorism in France.

The case is more complex than it initially appears, especially when it turns out the sinister, Sobranie-smoking Vanessa Hamilton (played by Silent Witness’s Emilia Fox), who is apparently running a bride-smuggling business for illegal immigrants, may somehow be linked to the kidnappings.

Then the aforementioned plane carrying British and French passengers crashes into the Channel, killing everyone on board, leaving our reunited cops and a cross-border team faced with even bigger questions from the clues that turn up in the sea.

And while you are delighted to welcome back the two familiar detectives, each with their well-realised frailties, not once do you get the impression you have seen any of this before.

The Tunnel: Sabotage, Thursday, 9.30pm, ABC.