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A heated debate lately went viral on social media, after a user asked the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how foolish they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series streams on Disney+ now.