Fortitude: chilly reception for Sky's new Arctic drama

Fortitude, the big-budget Arctic circle drama which premiered on Sky Atlantic last night, has left the critics underwhelmed.

The noirish thriller series is rumoured to have cost £25m and stars Sofie Grabol, Stanley Tucci and Michael Gambon in a series that combines a murder mystery with local power struggles, infidelity and eco fears. So why aren't the critics impressed?

Sam Wollaston in The Guardian calls Fortitude "a heroic but doomed attempt to muscle in on Scandinavian territory". Great original drama, says Wollaston "requires more than a big budget, stars, a great look, a fashionable, chilly location, advertising, stunts and polar bears on the tube".

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The trouble is "I don't care very much about any of these people or what happens to them. I'm not yet grabbed by the emotional cojones."

"That's because there are too many characters to get a handle on, even over the course of this feature-length special," says Ellen E Jones in The Independent.

Jones does however praise Richard Dormer, "who made an impression as the truculent" sheriff. "It's always a treat to watch Stanley Tucci at work," he says, "even when that work involves playing a London police officer with an improbable American accent".

Andrew Billen in The Times says Fortitude "has a lot going for it". Too much, in fact. With such a large cast and so many plot strands, scenes rarely last 90 seconds, which is not enough time to reveal story or character. "Wilful obscurantism is not unheard of when setting up a mystery drama," says Billen, "but Fortitude is all cloak and very little dagger."

Yes, says Jasper Rees in the Daily Telegraph: "Was Fortitude put together in some sort of box-ticking laboratory?" It feels like "everything possible has been thrown at this drama", which is long on sinister intrigue and opaque motivations. "But at this stage it's difficult to know who to root for."

Rees concedes there's still enough incentive to hang around in the frozen north for another episode or two. "But it needs sharper focus or there may be an epidemic of cold feet."

Fortitude is on Thursdays at 9pm on Sky Atlantic.

Fortitude: Sky's 'otherwordly' Arctic murder mystery

28 January

Sky Atlantic's new Arctic mystery series Fortitude, which airs in the UK and US this week, is attracting attention to match its reputed budget of £25m – the biggest single investment by Sky in an original drama.

So what can viewers expect for the money?

It's set in the tight-knit community of Fortitude, high in the Arctic circle, and deals with the fall-out from a murder investigation that begins to reveal the settlement's many other secrets.

Starring Stanley Tucci, Sophie Grabol from The Killing and Michael Gambon, Fortitude is written by Simon Donald, who scripted Channel 4 drama Low Winter Sun.

John Plunkett in The Guardian describes it as "relentlessly unsettling and claustrophobic, a blizzard (literally) of intrigue, infidelity, corruption and murder". Its clearest ancestor is David Lynch's Twin Peaks, but it "also reflects a burgeoning appetite among viewers for darker, more complex narratives" that can be traced to The Killing.

Yes, it draws out drama "in the manner of a classic Nordic Noir", says Serena Davis in the Daily Telegraph. But it's Fortitude's extraordinary geography that "gives the show a character of its own – and imbues the action with an overwhelming sense of threat".

It's an "otherwordly series", says Catherine Gee, also in the Telegraph. There's an "unsettling atmosphere" and "an eye for the weirdness, secrets and lies of people living on the outside".

There's also lots of sex, says Damian Whitworth in The Times. "In Fortitude characters keep warm by having sex, including in some very draughty-looking locations."

Whitworth says the show implies "that swinging is widespread and that those who are up for an extramarital roll in the snow hang wind chimes outside their houses".

And let's not forget polar bears. Fortitude begins with a polar bear doing terrible things to a man, and the animals represent a constant threat to the inhabitants of the town.

This led Sky to promote the launch of the new series with a life-size animatronic polar bear, which wandered through the streets of London this week, startling joggers on Hampstead Heath and commuters in tube stations, reports the Evening Standard.

Zai Bennett, Director of Sky Atlantic, said: "We wanted to bring a realistic polar bear to the streets of London to give people an up close experience of what it must be like to come face to face with one of the biggest, but uncredited stars of our new show."

Fortitude begins on Sky Atlantic on Thursday at 9pm.