'Fortitude,' 'Bosch,' 'Gomorrah': TV Crime Never Sleeps - New York Times

Remember when you could still complain that there was nothing on television but crime shows? You know, the bad old days of the 2000s. While the TV renaissance has radically changed the mix — hello, superheroes, political soaps, brittle sitcoms — the crime drama hasn’t gone away. And the rising tide has meant that it’s often more interesting than it used to be, and present in greater variety.

We’re in a soft spot in the schedule at the moment — “Legion” is over with; “Twin Peaks” is not quite here — so why not check out some current examples of TV’s most durable genre? A surreal Arctic thriller, a classic Los Angeles hard-boiled procedural and an operatic Mafia melodrama: Choose one or try all three. (Spoiler alert: Crucial details will be disclosed about the shows’ earlier seasons.)

Fortitude

This British take on Nordic noir, which moves to Amazon from the defunct channel Pivot, is all about isolation and the craziness it breeds. Set in the fictional town of Fortitude on a Norwegian Arctic island, it’s for those who like a hothouse atmosphere and some science-fiction flourishes with their murder mystery.

In Season 1, the troubled sheriff, Dan (Richard Dormer), with help from two spunky young deputies (Mia Jexen and Alexandra Moen), investigated a series of unsettling and often decidedly gross incidents that turned out to be linked to an ancient parasitic virus frozen in a mammoths’ graveyard. In Season 2, Dan is missing; the virus may still be around; and everyone’s getting hopped up on reindeer juice. (It’s an actual thing and it isn’t really juice.)

Dennis Quaid joins the cast as a fishing boat captain named Lennox, in keeping with the show’s odd scheme of having British and Scandinavian actors play the Norwegians, while Americans — Stanley Tucci in Season 1, and now Mr. Quaid — play characters who are apparently British.

Bosch

Also on Amazon, where its third 10-episode season went live last week, “Bosch” couldn’t be more different from “Fortitude.” Resolutely naturalistic, and predictable in a way that’s more reassuring than deflating, it’s straight-up Los Angeles noir: a cop with a code (and, in this case, a cool hilltop house) seeking justice amid the moral squalor of Hollywood.

The show, based on the novels of Michael Connelly, wears its heart pretty prominently on its sleeve, and sometimes it goes awfully far in its determination not to be flashy. It works because Detective Harry Bosch is embodied — in some absolute sense of the word — by Titus Welliver in a performance so natural and convincing that it’s hard to imagine him playing anything else.

Season 3 begins in the wake of Bosch’s crushing discovery that his mother’s killer, whom he finally identified in Season 2, is dead. The first episode extends or introduces at least four distinct story lines, and it’s a sign of the meticulousness with which the series is planned and plotted that one of them is being put in place for use in Season 4.

Gomorrah

The second season of this Italian series begins on Wednesday on SundanceTV, so no bingeing. But if you haven’t watched the gripping first season, which can be streamed from Netflix, you have a treat in store.

Based on the same book as the 2008 film “Gomorrah,” the show is a brooding, propulsive, totally addictive story of rival gangster clans in modern-day Naples, shot like a Brutalist chiaroscuro nightmare. Like any good Mafia tale, Season 2 begins in the aftermath of slaughter, with the mohawked hothead Genny (Salvatore Esposito) clinging to life and his gang wiped out. But the escape of Genny’s father, Don Pietro (Fortunato Cerlino), from prison means that a new balance of power is established.

It’s a shaky one, though, and Ciro (Marco D’Amore), the cool, calculating counterpart to the raging Genny, immediately gets back to work, figuring out how to eliminate everyone above him. (Four of the season’s 12 episodes were available for review.) Ciro is about as anti as TV antiheroes get, and in Season 2, he’s even more ruthless and violent. That’s saying something, given that Ciro got the drop on Genny in the Season 1 finale by opening fire at his own daughter’s children’s choir concert.

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