Thoughts on Agatha Christie’s Hjerson
Reality TV writer Klara Sandberg (Hanna Alström) listens to herself pitch new ideas for her show “Milf Hotelle” and is suddenly revolted by her own ideas. She suggests they should be making better television, and, inspired by the cover of a magazine lying nearby, proposes having famed Finnish detective Sven Hjerson (Johan Rheborg), solve crimes on television. She assures her colleagues that she can “get” the detective, so they greenlight the pilot. The problem is, Klara does not actually know Hjerson.
Because gossip is his main investigative tool and barbers like to chat, Hjerson has his hair cut daily. This makes it easy for Klara to find him.
The show is called AGATHA CHRISTIE’S HJERSON because, though Christie never wrote about him directly, she wrote a lot about Hercule Poirot who had a mystery writer friend named Ariadne Oliver. Hjerson was Oliver’s fictional detective.
Miss Marple, Christie’s other fictional sleuth also gathered information from gossip. Hjerson was once with the police, but left the force amid allegations that he planted evidence. In Christie’s novel “Nemesis“, Marple said: “I believe I could be ruthless if there was due cause.” Her housekeeper Cherry Baker asked: “What would you call due cause?” and Marple replied: “In the cause of justice.” So one wonders, did Hjerson, who loved gossip like Marple did, plant evidence to secure a conviction he thought was just? On the other hand, when Hjerson encounters his own nemesis, Inspector C.G. Robertsson (Jimmy Lindström), the cop who got him fired, Klara says: “He’s the one who stitched you up, isn’t he?” And Hjerson says “yes”, possibly implying that his dismissal from the force was unjustified.
We learn still more about Hjerson when, in “Phantom” (episodes 3 and 4), he visits an old friend named Harriet (Jonna Järnefelt) and makes French toast for her. In response, she flirts with him a little and gets a negative, but honest, response.
HARRIET: “Sven Hjerson’s French toast, here in this kitchen. You’re not having any?”
HJERSON: “I don’t eat butter anymore, or eggs, or milk. And I sleep with men. Mostly.”
Though Oliver describes her detective as vegetarian, this version of him is vegan. (He explains to hotel staff that he ordered from the vegan menu and complains that the fried aubergine “tasted slightly of bacon”.)
There are many parallels between Ariadne Oliver and Agatha Christie, and Oliver’s vegan, bisexual detective might be the character Christie really wanted to create.
When a client refers to journalists as “vultures”, he wraps his disagreement in metaphor. “The vulture doesn’t deserve it’s bad reputation,” he says. “It’s a very clean bird, which, unlike other scavengers, eats and neutralizes all harmful pathogens and doesn’t spread illnesses.” His favourite television show is MILF Hotelle, the one Klara currently writes for. He lives in Mariehamn, the capital of Åland, Baltic Sea islands that are an autonomous, Swedish-speaking region of Finland.
All we know about Klara is that she has been married for roughly a year to Niklas (David Fukamachi Regnfors), an odd man who insists that he and his wife abstain from sex for at least a year; makes their bedroom over in velvet; and embarks on a fasting regimen that somehow allows him to sniff glue. Her ten-year-old daughter Olivia (Maja Söderström) is both precocious and kleptomaniacal. Olivia will likely turn into a Daria-like person when she gets to high school.
When Klara pitches her idea for a TV show to Hjerson, he reacts negatively to the pitch, but positively to Klara.
HJERSON: ‘No. The last thing the world needs is another TV detective story. Instead, think about where Karl Åkerman’s boat has gone.”
KLARA: “The theory with the boat can’t be true. Why take the risk of running away to the boat club, jump in a boat, and then drive back to the beach to pick up the chicken man? It doesn’t make sense.”
HJERSON: “I’ve never felt more alive than when out driving with you.”
Even though Hjerson ultimately refuses to participate, Klara gets her show. The network hires the less than competent and possibly corrupt C.G. Robertsson instead, keeping Klara on as showrunner. Klara and Hjerson part with an ambiguous embrace the true meaning of which only Klara (and possibly Hjerson) knows. When Klara returns to Stockholm, Niklas tells her he’s leaving, and also that he has eaten all the food in the fridge.
Hjerson decides not to sell the hotel he recently inherited, and offers to keep Majvor on as housekeeper. The hotel is called Badhotellet Swan, and that might be a reference to the 2013 Danish comedy/drama Badehotellet.
In the course of four, two-part mysteries, eleven murders happen. Three people are shot, two fall from high places, one dies of hypothermia, one is hung, another is garrotted, and two more are poisoned. It is uncertain just how the chicken man dies.
After eight episodes, questions remain. Will Niklas really leave Klara? Who exactly is the mysterious housekeeper Majvor (Maria Lundqvist), who comes from Ångermanland in Northern Sweden and arrived in Mariehamn in 1972 when Hjerson was fourteen. And what happened to Sara (Saga Samuelsson) outside that barn in the episode eight flashback?
Hjerson has been accquired by Viasat World and Serieclub in France, SBS in Australia, ZDF in Germany, RTS in Switzerland, Topic in North America, and Radio-Canada Télé.
C More Entertainment declined to pick up the show for a second season.