Nordic noir is not short of suitors on streaming right now. Every other week brings another brooding Scandinavian detective, another compromised city, another investigator who drinks too much and feels everything too deeply. Into this crowded field steps Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole on Netflix, a 9-episode adaptation of The Devil’s Star, the fifth novel in Nesbø’s Harry Hole series, carrying a significant distinguishing credential: Nesbø himself serves as creator, lead writer, and executive producer.
That authorial involvement matters enormously. The 2017 film The Snowman, starring Michael Fassbender as Hole, demonstrated what careless handling of this material produces: a critically dismissed misfire plagued by production chaos. This series arrives as a deliberate correction. Oslo homicide detective Harry Hole (Tobias Santelmann) hunts a serial killer whose ritualistic MO involves severed fingers and pentagram-shaped ruby gemstones placed on or inside victims’ bodies, all while managing his alcoholism, a fragile romance with a single mother named Rakel (Pia Tjelta), and a deepening suspicion about his corrupt colleague Tom Waaler (Joel Kinnaman). The show is psychologically layered, atmospherically serious, and positioned as a franchise starter. Earning that status is a harder task than announcing it.
Three Villains, One Detective
The architecture of Detective Hole is deliberately overloaded, and this is simultaneously the show’s strength and its central problem.
The series opens with a bank robbery chase, tense and expertly filmed, that ends in tragedy: Harry’s partner dies, partly as a consequence of Harry’s own recklessness. Five years later, Harry is sober (mostly), in therapy (sort of), and constructing something real with Rakel and her son Oleg. Oslo, meanwhile, is suffering an unusual heatwave, gang violence is escalating, and a serial killer has begun leaving ritualistic evidence at scenes of mutilation. Harry is pulled back in.
The “whodunit” runs on three interlocking tracks: the serial killer investigation, Harry’s mounting confrontation with the polished and dangerous Waaler, and the gang warfare brewing beneath Oslo’s surface. Harry also possesses an unusual forensic gift, the ability to imaginatively reconstruct crime scenes from the victim’s perspective, placing himself inside their final moments. This device, hovering between procedural realism and psychological horror, gives the show a distinctive texture that most detective dramas lack the confidence to attempt.
The opening episodes are strong. The hooks are well-placed, the cliffhangers earn their keep, and the central mystery sustains genuine tension. Then the middle stretch arrives, and the series starts accumulating subplots like a detective accumulating bad leads: a journalist character who feels undercooked, a priest conducting a clandestine affair in Prague, gang turf war escalations that occasionally drift into their own separate drama. The 9-episode runtime feels like a decision made in a boardroom rather than a writers’ room. A tighter five or six episodes would, I suspect, have produced a sharper and far less exhausting experience.
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The final episodes recover, delivering payoffs that feel earned and a cliffhanger that argues persuasively for a second season. Nesbø’s fingerprints are visible throughout — the red herrings feel purposeful, the character psychology precise, the contradictions affectionately observed.
Two Sides of the Same Corroded Coin
The casting of this series is, to put it plainly, excellent. The casting of the two leads is exceptional.
Tobias Santelmann plays Harry Hole as a man perpetually in negotiation with his own worst instincts. He is physically formidable (there is a scene involving a moving car and one arm that makes the point efficiently) yet emotionally porous, capable of sudden, disarming gentleness. A sequence in which Harry helps Rakel’s son Oleg overcome his fear of diving from the high platforms at a public pool reveals the character’s core honestly: Harry is a man who understands what courage costs because he has spent years losing it to a bottle.
His alcoholism is treated with seriousness and without sentimentality. When he backslides, the show does not photograph it with romantic warmth. It costs him something real each time. Santelmann is careful, too, to let Harry’s self-awareness coexist with his self-destruction. At one point a character tells Harry he is “a giant cliché,” and he cannot argue. The performance is layered enough that this lands as a character beat rather than a writer’s joke at the protagonist’s expense.
Joel Kinnaman’s Tom Waaler is the series’ other great achievement. Polished, dangerously charming, and powered by a cold pragmatism that never overheats into cartoonish menace, Waaler is the version of Harry that skipped the guilt entirely. Kinnaman locates genuine psychological logic in an abhorrent man. Waaler’s corruption is a coherent worldview, not random cruelty, which makes him far scarier than a conventional villain. The scenes between Santelmann and Kinnaman generate the series’ most electric dramatic energy. The serial killer plot, absorbing as it is, occasionally feels like an interruption.
The supporting cast carries significant weight. Ingrid Bolsø Berdal’s Ellen, Harry’s partner, is warm and substantive. Tjelta’s Rakel is grounded and fully realised, her chemistry with Santelmann quietly convincing. Ellen Helinder’s forensic expert Beate Lønn provides the procedural scenes with a dry, level-headed intelligence that the show would struggle without. Peter Stormare makes a sharp impression in limited screen time as a gang leader. Kelly Gale, cast as a journalist, draws the short straw: her character is underwritten in a way that feels like an editing casualty rather than a creative choice.
The recurring visual motif of Harry framed against empty picture frames and wide Oslo skylines does meaningful work. Isolation is not simply implied; it is designed into every wide shot.
A City That Sweats
Nordic noir, as a visual tradition, has trained audiences to expect cold: steel-grey skies, frost-bitten streets, a general atmosphere of Scandinavian emotional suppression rendered in weather. Detective Hole subverts this immediately by dropping Oslo into a heatwave. The city sweats. The architecture strains under the light. People gather at public swimming pools with the kind of desperation that only oppressive heat produces. It is a disorienting choice that generates precisely the right kind of unease, relocating the show’s dread from the landscape into the human body.
Directors Øystein Karlsen and Anna Zackrisson, working with cinematographer Ronald Plante, filmed the series on location across Oslo at considerable scale. The city is rendered with a tactile, lived-in presence: gleaming nighttime lights sit alongside grimy alleyways, and the production deploys both the lush and the squalid without hierarchy. Oslo here functions as a city with a hidden criminal circulatory system, its respectable surface continuously undermined by what moves beneath. The colour palette — cold blues, industrial greys, warm amber leaking from bar interiors — serves as a visual index of Harry’s psychological state. You can read his mood by reading the frame.
The music is equally considered. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, whose original score sustains the show’s atmosphere of coiled dread, are a logical fit given their extensive work in crime-adjacent cinema. The needle drops, The Ramones, Iggy Pop, PJ Harvey, The Moody Blues, Warren Zevon among them, are curated with precision, adding emotional texture rather than simply filling silence. The music choices also double as character biography. Harry’s love of rock, signalled early by a vintage Pixies t-shirt, gives him specificity and personality that dialogue alone could not supply.
The violence, when it arrives, is grim and deliberate. The murder tableaux are designed to disturb. The show does not linger gratuitously, but it does not blink either. The closest tonal comparison among crime dramas is Luther: morally uncompromising, character-driven, and built for audiences who want their darkness to mean something.
The Franchise Question
Nordic noir earned its global reputation by doing something specific well: marrying atmospheric texture with psychological depth and class-conscious social observation. Detective Hole meets most of those criteria credibly. Where it occasionally falters is the genre-blending, specifically the integration of Harry’s hallucinatory visions into the procedural framework. The visions are visually striking and inventive in their staging, effective as expressions of Harry’s psychological disintegration. They are also, at times, convenient — a way of propelling the plot that sidesteps the harder work of earned revelation.
The serial killer storyline is absorbing, but the Harry-Waaler dynamic is what the show actually lives and dies by. This suggests the series’ real subject, beneath the whodunit machinery, is the psychology of men shaped by institutions they are supposed to represent. Both characters are products of institutional policing; both are corroded by it in different directions. One absorbs the guilt; the other absorbs the power. That is a richer conversation than any mystery plot provides on its own.
Nesbø’s back catalogue spans over a dozen Harry Hole novels. The season ends on a cliffhanger that makes a persuasive case for continuing. The production quality, the casting, and the authorial care are all present. A second season, ideally trimmed and sharpened, could be something genuinely special.
Jo Nesbo’s Detective Hole premiered on Netflix on March 26, 2026, bringing the celebrated Norwegian anti-hero Harry Hole to the screen for a nine-episode debut season. Based specifically on the novel The Devil’s Star, the series follows a brilliant but self-destructive homicide detective as he hunts a serial killer across the shadowy streets of Oslo while clashing with his corrupt rival, Tom Waaler. All episodes are currently available for streaming globally on the Netflix platform.
Where to Watch Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole Online
Full Credits
Title: Jo Nesbo’s Detective Hole
Distributor: Netflix
Release date: March 26, 2026
Rating: TV-MA
Running time: 45 to 60 minutes
Director: Øystein Karlsen, Anna Zackrisson
Writers: Jo Nesbø
Producers and Executive Producers: Tor Arne Øvrebø, Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Amelia Granger, Katy Rozelle, Rene Ezra, Øystein Karlsen, Jo Nesbø, Niclas Salomonsson
Cast: Tobias Santelmann, Joel Kinnaman, Pia Tjelta, Peter Stormare, Anders Baasmo Christiansen, Ellen Helinder, Simon J. Berger, Ingrid Bolsø Berdal
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Pål Ulvik Rokseth
Editors: Zaklina Stojcevska, Simen Gengenbach
Composer: Nick Cave, Warren Ellis
The Review
Jo Nesbø's Detective Hole
Jo Nesbø's Detective Hole arrives as a serious, atmospheric crime drama anchored by two outstanding lead performances and a city rendered with genuine cinematic intelligence. Nesbø's authorial involvement gives the material psychological precision that adapted crime fiction rarely achieves. The mid-series pacing sags under the weight of accumulated subplots, and the 9-episode runtime tests patience before the finale earns its keep. What lingers is Santelmann and Kinnaman: two actors making a flawed but absorbing series feel essential.
PROS
- Santelmann and Kinnaman deliver career-best performances
- Oslo is filmed with rare atmospheric intelligence
- Nesbø's authorial involvement produces precise, psychologically rich writing
- Nick Cave and Warren Ellis score sustains mood throughout
- Strong, substantive female supporting characters
CONS
- 9-episode runtime is too long; mid-series pacing suffers noticeably
- Several subplots feel underdeveloped or abandoned
- Kelly Gale's journalist character is significantly underwritten
- Harry's hallucinatory sequences occasionally feel like plot shortcuts
Sorry, no. As others have noted: Blank flat personalities is right. Especially the alcoholic unsympathetic “hero” -ugh.
Plodding. No sense of urgency. Repetitive. Worn out really unoriginal tropes. One thread worth exploring: corruption and authoritarianism in law enforcement and political circles.
For a so-called brilliant cop he is dull dull dull — does not seem very bright or self aware at all. None of them do. No wonder the baddies run circles around them. Joel Kinnaman at least tried to make his character compelling. Not a lot to work with. A really disappointing mess.