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A intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked the question to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how stupid they had been to select the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series is on Disney+ now.