The Bridge: Season Three...

Goodbye Saga Noren. I am a huge fan and I hope we meet again. But, if not, thanks to you and your police colleagues for keeping me entertained, enthralled and thrilled for three seasons. Even better, for a show whose central characters teeter on the brink of personal disaster and terrible tragedy virtually every week, we even had a sort of happy ending. This, of course, could just be a happy ending and that's it... or it could be the springboard for a possible fourth season. Here’s hoping!

The Bridge is Noridc Noir, a generic description for the spate of superb thrillers such as The Killing and Borgen that came out of Denmark and won deserved worldwide acclaim. The Bridge is a Swedish and Danish co-production and, like the excellent The Killing, it's essentially a superior and intelligent police thriller that operates at its own pace and doesn't feel the need to explain every single thing or pander to its audience. 

The opening two series followed the chalk-and-cheese relationship between strait-laced, OCD-suffering and high-functioning autistic Swedish detective Saga Noren, played by the astonishingly brilliant Sofia Helin, and her Danish detective counterpart, the flawed Martin Rohde (Kim Bodnia).

The third season sees Saga work alongside a new partner, haunted drug-user Henrik Sabroe, played by Thure Lindhardt, as they hunt a serial killer who's targeting victims connected to a multi-millionaire and using his art collection for inspiration when committing the murders.

We also gradually meet the supporting cast of characters. Many of these, such as Saga's boss, Hans Petterson, and IT expert John Lundqvist, we've met before, but others, such as millionaire Freddie Holst and Saga's mother, Marie-Louise Norén, are new. 

I could wax lyrical about how the complex plot perfectly hangs together, or how the intrigue is consistently and tautly maintained, or how brilliant the scriptwriting is, or how excellent the whole cast are, or how the black humour is pointed and beautiful, or how the third season is every bit as good as the first.. But I’d probably end up boring myself and anyone else who chances on this and reads this.

Instead, give it a whirl. It’s ten one-hour-long episodes and it’s probably the best thing you’ll see on TV this year. I genuinely haven’t seen better. It has no weak points. 

A word of warning, though. The only problem with watching something as good as The Bridge is that it may raise the bar too high for pretty much anything you watch again ever. 

It is that good.