The Bridge (TV series)

The Bridge is the English-speaking market title for the series known as Bron in Swedish and Broen in Danish. It is a Police Procedural Thriller co-produced by the national TV companies of Denmark and Sweden. The first series was shown in its native countries in 2011, and in 2012 followed Forbrydelsen onto BBC 4 in the UK. A second season has been confirmed in Scandinavia, while remakes are being looked at in both the US (with Mexico) and the UK (with France)

The series begins when two halves of two separate womens' bodies discovered on the Øresund bridge that links Copenhagen (Denmark) with Malmö (Sweden), carefully dumped at the exact point where the bridge is divided by the international border. As a result, the two cities' police forces are forced to collaborate on the investigation, led by Saga Norén (Sweden) and Martin Rohde (Denmark). Threatening messages are then received by the police and media, from somebody purporting to have committed the murders to draw attention to social problems.

Tropes used in The Bridge (TV series) include:

Alone with the Psycho: Several times.
Ambiguous Disorder: Saga. The actor and writers have said that she probably is autistic/Asperger in some way, but that they didn't explicitly state it to keep their freedom of writing without offending/misleading people.
Best Served Cold
Bilingual Dialogue: All the dialogue is in either Danish or Swedish depending on who's talking.
- The languages are mutually intelligible - Rohde asks his Swedish counterparts if they can understand his Danish.
By-The-Book Cop: Saga takes her duties very seriously. After finding a store camera that could have useful evidence on it, she gets the camera's memory card - and then mentions that the store-owner doesn't actually have permission for the camera.
Can Not Tell a Lie: Saga is frequently noted as being a terrible liar, which she is trying to improve. Naturally, this becomes vitally important in the finale.
Crazy Homeless People: Sonja
Criminal Mind Games
Dead Little Sister: Saga's sister killed herself at some point in the past. Jens' wife and son were killed in a car crash.
Deadly Gas
Defective Detective: An Odd Couple of them; a By-The-Book Cop Swede with No Social Skills and a laid-back Dane who Really Gets Around.
Do You Want to Copulate?: If Saga wants to have sex with someone, she doesn't beat around the bush. No pun intended.
Dysfunction Junction: All the significant characters are so screwed up that you'll start thinking the killer has a point.
Exact Words: Saga, who Can Not Tell a Lie, tries to reassure Martin by telling him that "we found August", and that he's being taken to the hospital. After she repeats that exact wording a couple of times, the killer points out that she's not saying they found him alive...
External Combustion
Faking the Dead
Fan Disservice: This being a Scandinavian show, there's a lot of casual nudity (especially involving Saga, Stefan and Sonja), but the style of the shots is so clinical and the events sometimes so disturbing that it's rarely erotic.
Groin Attack: The killer kicking Rohde in the balls, possibly because he knows that Rohde just had a vasectomy.
Hand of Death: The show likes depicting the killer as a pair of gloved hands driving a car to the next crime scene.
Headphones Equal Isolation: August.
Hope Spot: Saif and his father decide not to kill Henning and to let him go. Then the killer turns up in a police uniform and guns him down. Later when it's falsely implied that August survived.
I Can Still Fight: Saga in the final episode, continuing to try to save August and Martin after being shot twice by the killer and minimally treated in hospital.
I Have Your Wife: And children
Incredibly Obvious Bomb: Actually a cruel joke.
Infant Immortality: Unexpectedly played straight with the school bus hijack, and later Martin's younger children
Insane Troll Logic: The killer wants to draw attention to the plight of the vulnerable in society, by murdering them in incredibly cruel and gruesome ways.
It's Personal: In the final few episodes, Martin discovers that Jens wants revenge against him, for sleeping with his wife just before she died. He takes his wife and kids, and his teenage son, hostage.
Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: Charlotte paying the entire ransom just to spite her dead husband and spend her stepdaughter's money
Jurisdiction Friction: Part of the initial hype for the show, and possibly hoped for by the killer. But actually the two police forces work together pretty well, barring some arguments over who gets to carry a gun (initially humorous but later played more seriously).
Keeping Secrets Sucks: Saga complains about being asked to keep Martin' secret that he's the guy who had an affair with Jens' wife.
Kick the Son of a Bitch: Ferbé's introductory scene, where he viciously mocks a sad-sack colleague for his unhipness and taste in music, makes him appear so unpleasant that the unspeakably horrible things that happen to him immediately afterwards seem karmic and comical.
Limited Wardrobe: We hope that Saga has several identical pairs of black leather trousers. If not, she probably isn't very pleasant to be around.
Looking for Love In All the Wrong Places
Magic Plastic Surgery: Jens
Mailer Daemon: August and the killer, who is pretending to be a (real) female friend of his.
Murder.Com: The two "Truth Terrorist" sites, one for each country. Which the killer uses to broadcast Bjorn's murder and threaten to kill the school bus children.
Murderer POV: The start.
National Stereotypes: Plays throughout with stereotypes of the Swedish as uptight and Danes as laidback.
No Shirt, Long Jacket: Sonja throughout the first couple of episodes.
No Sense of Humor

Rohde: [Saga] doesn't do jokes.

No Social Skills: Saga. Played sometimes seriously, as when she callously interrogates a guy over the phone while he's trapped in a car with a time bomb, and sometimes comically as when she picks up a guy in a bar with "want to have sex at my place?" and freaks him out when she post-coitally starts her laptop up and looks at gruesome autopsy photos in bed.
Porn Stache: Stefan the Swedish social worker.
Running Gag: Saga's boss explaining "She meant to say 'How are you?'", Martin's insistence that Saga needs a hobby, and the Swedes waking Martin up early in the morning while he's sleeping.
Sealed Room in the Middle of Nowhere: Two variations are used in the finale, for Mette and her kids -- a shack in the countryside, which they're locked inside with a live grenade, and for August -- bricked up behind a false wall in a secret location.
Shoot Your Mate: With an innocent bystander.
Start to Corpse
Strike Me Down with All of Your Hatred: The killer first tries to set this up with Henning and the family of the guy who was killed by the cops, and then with himself and Martin.
Theme Serial Killer
Turn in Your Badge: Briefly discussed and defied; once the case becomes personal for Rohde, it's suggested that he be taken off it. He matter-of-factly states that if he is, he'll just keep investigating on his own time, so he's kept on.
You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Ferbé, who after losing his job, gets gassed to death in his car
Your Cheating Heart: Martin is a serial case. He's gone through several marriages because of it, and his current one is on the rocks, but it really comes back to haunt him when it turns out the killer is after him because he slept with his wife years ago, shortly before she left him and died in an accident.