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An heated debate lately went viral across online platforms, after someone asked the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Setup

To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which violence, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series is on Disney+ currently.