Swedish thriller 'Top Dog' suffers from an awful, generic title (at least in English translation) that tells you little of what the series is about; but it also suffers from not being completely clear what it is about. In the first scene, we see a businessman threatened (and apparently murdered); then we learn that he wasn't in fact murdered but was independently kidnapped. He's rescued long before the series ends, and the focus shifts to corruption in the companies his family ran; finally, it shifts again to a man who at first seems to be involved in the investigation into these events for semi-random reasons, but whose story turns out to be the greater part of the series' point. At times it's hard to follow, but worse than this, the viewer loses interest as the big story in each episode loses importance thereafter as the programme explores only loosely related twists. It felt like drama-by-numbers to me, as if the screenwriters had assembled parts from a fairly standard menu of ingredients: the result is complex, but not particularly coherent, or good.
Review of Top Dog
