—
4
TV SERIES
“Kids In Crime Season 2”
Series creator: Kenneth Karlstad
8 episodes (each 20 min.)
TV 2 and TV 2 Play
—
Poor Sarpsborg. As if the town hasn’t lain and dipped in Østfold’s backwater long enough, Kenneth Karlstad pops a new season of the TV drama “Kids In Crime” which turns “Særp” into a stark white, blood-splattered and blue-foaming spot on the Norwegian map.
The series creator takes the boundaries that “Kids In Crime” failed to cross in the first season seriously this time. Here, there are neither sideburns nor airbags, and the drama thrusts like an Amstaff straight into the action’s throat, roughly where it left off last time. Many wounds must be stitched together. Freddy Hælvette is gone from the face of the earth after being shot. Monica chases the next pill like a butterfly on speed, Tommy struggles to keep the urine samples clean and washes away the anxiety with GHB, and Pål is by no means in his element either: hurt, distraught, Xanor-munching and suicidal. And both the physical and mental sound of the chaos this quartet causes is turned up to eleven when Freddy’s disappearance leads to Østfold’s drought of the only thing that matters, free access to Rohypnol, or “hypæræ”.
Read also: NRK’s new series “Ora jaska” stands firmly on its own two feet
The first season of “Kids In Crime” won both the audience and awards after the premiere in 2022, a boundary-breaking series about crime and severe psychosis in youth environments in Sarpsborg in the early 2000s, much of it drawn from series creator Kenneth Karlstad’s own experiences from when he grew up there. If the series didn’t exactly lead to “Kids In Crime” tourism to “Særp”, the environmental descriptions and the mixed (mis)use of hard-nosed seriousness and rough humor, and a cast of dysfunctional children of the era, were a hit.
The first season revolved around 17-year-old Tommy (Kristian Repshus) and partly Pål (Martin Øvrevik). In season 2, the accompanying mockery is directed at Monica, a notorious pill hunter, but perhaps not completely incurable in the form of Lea Myren, who this season largely rests on. And it does it well, with the grandmother Lissy, or Mommo (Wenche Bjerke), as a fabulous foundation for a story that further develops the series when it comes to minorities and those who fall outside, here specifically in a Norwegian chapter of shame.
We receive painful remarks about the Norwegian state’s – and people’s – treatment of “the traveling people”, those who were called “Taters”. And they are still called that here, in the 2000s with racism, prejudice and pure human contempt.
Lissy is from the Scandinavian Romani people, who right up until our time were discriminated against and hunted, deprived of their children, lobotomized and sterilized. Almost the entire first episode is a flashback to the teenager Lissy’s (here played by Moa Aukland) stay at Bjerketun in Bærum in 1958, a “special school” for girls where “tate children” were interned, and which was notorious for its brutal institutional environment through abuse and sterilization . So Lissy naturally became tough as nails, and a tough grandmother. But “Mommo” and Monica also find each other over some softer realities they have to come to terms with.
Read also: “Tre menn til Vilma” is a well-acted dramatic comedy based on the novel by Gudrun Skretting
The relationship between the two forms the very connecting and fragile thread in “Kids In Crime 2”, and it is needed when old men are more scumbags than ever, when Freddy goes berserk, when Peggy Hund delivers an angry Amstaff bite – and the source behind the whole Østfold’s “hyppær” warehouse is an anonymous, life-threatening factor to which Freddy obviously owes money.
This will be a story about lies, swindlers and hard-hitting 2000s techno, about greed for money and advanced hunting rifles, and a “home alone” party that goes to such extremes that even Irvine Welsh’s drug nightmare from Edinburgh’s dirtiest underbelly in “Trainspotting », is hardly close.
Screenwriter and director Kenneth Karlstad turns things up, and the rich ensemble counts a flood of good type roles and individual performances. We shall not “spoil” the most sensational ones. But again, among the main roles, Jakob Oftebro’s blue-foam-flowing and totally imploding Freddy Hælvette will become a master’s degree syllabus for “bad guy” actors, while Repshus as Tommy “Montana” has some absolutely priceless sweaty and small scenes, such as when he has to submit a urine sample with a home drill… yes, wait and see.
Throughout, this is Lea Myren’s season. She turns the Monica Larsen figure into an overall believable figure, far out there on the swingarm, at the same time vulnerable and of course just as tough and powerful when it comes down to it, as the grandmother.
Read also: Happiness is fragile and the backdrop dark in the third and final season of “Lykkeland” on NRK
Pål Rønnevik’s waving and, in a flash, brilliant photography is as grainy as the pixels on the Nokia phones of the time, and the piss-yellow air in the smoke- and barn-smelling pine huts can be cut with a knife. That’s how you instinctively hold your nose, helped by Sofie Diana Gjermundsen’s true-to-life production design. There is also no shortage of contrasts in the visual expression. The most striking is in the scenes from Bjerketun in the 1950s, which are filmed in beautiful and crisp “film noir” black and white.
Overall, it is still so messy at times that it goes beyond logic, and some of the same applies to the story, with a number of dead ends and a bit too many scenes that are spread out despite episodes of only 20 minutes. Well, little blue-green pill men are fun. For a while. It is as if Karlstad, together with the otherwise good editors Patrick Larsgaard and Thomas Grotmol, are so captivated by some sequences that they completely forget to use the scissors. Having said that, there is little to say about the progress itself. If it is not as rectilinear as the powder streaks on the glass tables, then it is black humor pill for pill effective, until it hangs in the air in the last scene as a promise of a season 3.