Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Anxious People’ On Netflix, Where A Father-Son Team Of Bumbling Cops Try To Solve A Robbery With Reluctant Witnesses

Comedies that revolve around crimes are rare, but the ones that work balance funny elements as well as poignant and dramatic ones. But the balance is hard to achieve and maintain. So one one show comes around that manages to do both, you take notice. A new Netflix series from Sweden manages to achieve that balance, at least to start.

ANXIOUS PEOPLE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A young man jogs across a bridge. He stops and touches the railing as a memory comes back to him.

The Gist: About ten years before, when he was a kid, Jack Johansson (Alfred Svensson) saw a man in a suit take a swan dive off that same bridge, his backpack loaded with rocks. It’s obvious that the man wanted to off himself, and he handed Jack a note to give to his loved ones.

Back to the present, he goes back home where he lives with his father Jim (Dan Ekborg). They’re both cops in the Swedish town where they live, and they commute into work together. But first, Jim is hopeful that Jack’s sister Jill will join them for the New Year; Jim even wired her some money for a train ticket. Jack is dismayed that his dad fell for Jill’s gambit for more drug money for the umpteenth time.

Meanwhile, a group of people tour an apartment for an open house: The very pregnant Julia (Carla Sehn) and her partner Ro (Petrina Solange), older couple Anna-Lena (Marika Lagercrantz) and Roger (Leif Andree), the very anxious Zarah (Anna Grannath), the more confident Estelle (Lottie Ejebrant) and Lennart (Per Andersson), who — for some reason — goes to the open house wearing a BDSM-themed bunny suit.

Then we see a masked robber bust into a bank and hold a teller at gunpoint — until the teller holds a sign saying that the robber is in a cashless bank. Jack is in the middle of a haircut across from the station, and he leaves to argue with his dad about Jill once the stylist, Milou (Shima Niavarani), tells him she knows about Jill’s visit. As the argument spills into the street, Milou alerts them to what’s going on right behind them.

They chase the robber into the building where the open house is going on and he holds everyone there hostage. Even though Jack and Jim don’t usually deal with big crimes like this, Jim thinks they can handle it on their own without the support of the police in nearby Stockholm. So they wait out the robber; he demands, oddly enough, pizza and fireworks. The robber releases the hostages, but when Jack and Jim go into the apartment, with the Stockholm SWAT team (Jack called the city cops for backup), they see no one.

When the father and son question the hostages, none of them give a solid description of the robber, but some of their descriptions are patently ridiculous, making the two of them wonder just what happened to the robber.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Anxious People has a quirky, first-season-of-Fargo vibe to it, where most of the cops are mediocre at best and the criminals make a lot of mistakes.

Our Take: Based on the novel by Fredrik Backman, Anxious People sets itself up as a mystery involving a father-son cop team, an inept bank robber and the disparate group of people he takes hostage. But what it’s really about is the lives of all of those people, and how they came together in that particular moment. Director Felix Herngren and writer Camilla Ahlgren have managed to take Backman’s story and weave a narrative that’s at times goofy and at other times genuinely emotional.

The first episode barely scratches the surface of this story, mostly examining Jim and Jack’s relationship, the conflict they have over Jill, and their general incompetence as police officers. Jim acknowledges they might be making “fools” of themselves when Jack sees a box of wires on a landing and thinks it’s a bomb, but he still has enough pride to be annoyed that his son called the Stockholm PD for backup. But their sincere conversations about Jill show that the two of them have a close relationship and that there’s definite angst in their lives, even though we still laugh when we see Jack chasing a bank robber with a clip in his hair.

The rest of the limited series’ season will dive into the lives of the other victims, which we’re looking forward to seeing. Of course, the one that intrigues us the most is Lennart, whose bunny suit is quite, um, something. But we’re interested in getting into everyone’s inner lives, because that will likely help us get to the bottom of this mystery, likely way ahead of Jack and Jim. At this point, we don’t even know whether the robber actually escaped or he/she posed as one of the hostages. Just the notion that we’re thinking that hard about the plot makes us think that this story will be entertaining.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Jim lets the hostages go home, telling them to think about things over New Year’s and see if they can come up with new observations. Jack is determined to get to the bottom of this robbery.

Sleeper Star: It would be too easy to give this to the guy in the bunny suit, so we’ll just say that the entire group of hostages intrigues us.

Most Pilot-y Line: This may be the translation, but when the SWAT commander from Stockholm sees Jack’s half-done haircut, he describes it this way: “It cuts right across your face and lands in a baby face, with a patchy moustache in a style I’ve never seen before.” That’s an insult, we guess.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Anxious People manages to be funny and poignant and keep a balance between the two. As the mystery gets investigated and we get to know the hostages, we hope that the show should be able to achieve that same balance.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Anxious People On Netflix