Follow the Money: will BBC's new Scandi-noir be a hit?

A new Danish TV series about corruption and murder in the green energy industry starts this Saturday on BBC4, but will Follow the Money capture fans' imaginations in the same way as Nordic noir hits The Killing, The Bridge and Trapped?

The ten-part series was created by Jeppe Gjervig Gram, who co-wrote Borgen, and casts a cynical eye over corporate greed in a cut-throat renewable energy firm known as Energreen.

When a body turns up near an offshore wind farm belonging to the respected eco-energy company, its eccentric, media-savvy boss, Alexander, becomes caught up in a sordid tale of corporate malfeasance, double cross and murder.

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Follow the Money is "like a cross between Wall Street and Borgen", says Tom Seymour in The Guardian. Scandinavian television is so popular in part because of the sustained quality of acting and viewers can "expect more of the same from this show", he adds.

Indeed, says Boyd van Hoeij in the Hollywood Reporter, this "sleekly packaged series" is headlined by two actors most famous for their "stellar work" in Dogme films.

The Killing's Nikolaj Lie Kaas plays the enigmatic Alexander, while Festen star Thomas Bo Larsen plays police detective Mads Justesen, who links the dead body with suspicious goings-on in the energy world.

Both actors "are old hands at this sort of generically slick material and their steely determination is convincing", says Hoeij. While the first two episodes are somewhat slow out of the blocks, "there's more than enough time for this to turn into something meatier and more involving", he adds.

The storytelling is "intricate and the characters compelling", says Robin Jarossi at Crime Preview, and the opening episode "concludes with a neat twist that ups the ante beautifully".

Jarossi also points out that the series title refers to All the President's Men, where the investigative reporters who cracked the Watergate scandal were told by a whistleblower to follow the money trail. This, says Jarossi, "neatly encapsulates this quality drama's air of paranoia and double-dealing".

The action is at its most dynamic behind the commercial sheen of Energreen or deep in the bowels of the financial crime squad, says Henry Northmore on The List. But while the characters' home lives do add an extra dimension, they slow the plot and there's "a sluggish pace compared to some of the big guns of Nordic noir genre".

Nevertheless, he says, while Follow the Money takes its time to get going, it is still a "classy investigation that feels like it has many more secrets to divulge".

Follow the Money premieres on BBC4 at 9pm on 19 March