Wallander: An Event In Autumn - TV review

Sunday night telly used to be there in order to ease you into the week ahead, writes Andrew Owen. With Monday morning just hours away, the TV schedulers were offering you a small crumb of comfort to take your mind off the inevitable, allowing you to go to bed with a smile on your face, convinced that – even for a few hours – the world wasn't that bad a place.

Let Monday wait, they were saying. Switch your brain off and . . . just . . . relax . . .

Nowadays we have Wallander, with Kenneth Branagh as the sour-faced Swedish detective, and it's enough to send most people to sleep like the man himself – passed out in an armchair with an empty bottle of wine on the floor, having drunk themselves into oblivion while staring into the middle distance and contemplating the futility of it all.

But it started almost hopefully. Kurt Wallander has moved on from his divorce and bought his dream home with his girlfriend and her young son.

"A new start," he said, seven minutes in. I do believe he even smiled. (I'm sure he did because I wrote down the time. I don't think I've ever seen Wallander smile before. I thought he was born without the muscles.)

"I'm basically quite a cheerful person," he said.

And then, of course, he found a human jawbone in the garden, which led to a body being unearthed.

Oh, and severed bits and pieces of a pregnant girl's body were washed up on a beach.

And while he was investigating with his partner Ann-Britt, he got attacked by two German Shepherds, a breed Kurt really loves, and Ann Britt had to shoot them dead, only to get a sledgehammer wrapped around her head by the dogs' owner, a man who put his own daughters on the game.

Oh, and Kurt's daughter isn't talking to him any more, and his inability to switch off from his work is causing trouble in his relationship.

And his stepson ignores him when he tells him to clean his teeth.

And he's never really gotten over the death of his father and their at times strained relationship.

And a plane dropped on the new house, killing thousands of people. And the entire police department came down with the ebola virus and died on the spot, and one of the coppers investigating the body in Kurt's garden smashed a box full of plates, and the winter's drawing in and it's getting cold and bleak and – oh my sweet lord I don't think I can take any more, I really don't. Where's my bottle of gin?

Actually, I may have made up the plane crash and the ebola virus, but had they happened I wouldn't have been surprised – the sheer level of misery hurled at Wallander meant anything was likely.

There was once scene in last night where Wallander went to Ann-Britt's hospital bedside and stood over her poor, bandaged body. "Talk to her," said the nurse. But Wallander couldn't find any words – which is probably for the best, because the moment he started speaking Ann-Britt would probably have woken from her coma just so she could switch off her own life support machine.

And yet it's compulsive viewing, even if you're secretly hoping that Kurt will wake up in his armchair one morning and, in a moment of clarity, decide to jack in the police lark and open a market garden.

He's a great detective, but he's not cut out to be a detective.

Look, I like the bloke and I just want him to be happy. Is that too much to ask?

Won't someone cut him a bit of slack for once?

Just once?

Please?

There's two more of these misery fests to come. I imagine the Samaritans have already drafted in an army of extra counsellors.