One of Netflix’s more interesting recent original series, The Breakthrough, is a four-part miniseries based on journalist Anna Boden and genealogist Peter Sjölund’s book examining the second-largest criminal investigation in Swedish history. The show has already cracked Netflix’s Top 10 list and has earned a strong 77% score on Rotten Tomatoes’ Popmeter, the metric for audience reception.
However, it’s gone largely under the radar despite being a great candidate for the next foreign crime drama to capture American audiences, a la The Killing or Broadchurch. If you’re a crime drama fan, or just want a good show you can binge-watch in one night, here’s why you should watch The Breakthrough on Netflix.
The Breakthrough’s story is incredible … and (mostly) true
On October 19, 2004, an 8-year-old boy and 56-year-old woman, both unrelated to one another, were murdered in broad daylight in the small Swedish city of Linköping. The only witness was a local biker, but she could not identify the suspect before he fled. The unprecedented brutality and brazenness of the crime shocked the quiet city, but with no real leads or hard evidence, the case soon grew cold.
It remained that way for 16 years until a genealogist (here named Per Skogvist, played by Mattias Nordkvist) introduces to the case’s lead detective (here named John Sundin, played by Peter Eggers) a pioneering new method of DNA analysis. This method helped track down the Golden State Killer, subject of another true crime favorite, I’ll Be Gone In the Dark. While in that instance, police leveraged the genealogy website 23andme to solve its crime, Swedish police in The Breakthrough’s real-life case used DNA swabs from volunteers to establish a link from DNA at the scene to the community at large. This practice soon raised serious ethical and legal questions.
The Breakthrough isn’t your usual true crime show
Although The Breakthrough has a strong cast led by Eggers and Nordkvist, the real protagonist is time itself. Often alluded to in true crime podcasts and dramas, it’s rare that the impact of time is so central to a story. The series plays out over 16 years as detective John Sundin (Eggers) finds it increasingly impossible to cope with the failure to solve this case, the family’s pain remaining unresolved, a journalist earnestly trying to help without interfering, and the community feels permanently haunted by the terror that anyone can be a victim of violent crime anywhere, even in suburban Sweden.
Even more intriguingly, The Breakthrough is largely uninterested in its villain. Believed to be a 15- to 30-year-old male with a psychiatric disorder, as time passes and all leads go cold, that description becomes more and more irrelevant. Instead, writer Oskar Söderlund and director Lisa Siwe focus on the personal toll the case takes on the investigators and the victims’ families. The show handles its victims, the community, and the various investigators with compassion and sympathy, promoting the roles of patience and empathy when dealing with horrifying crimes.
The Breakthrough is free of the fire and brimstone you often see in true crime. Instead, it’s complex and methodical, delivering rich, complicated characters navigating heavy emotions and pushing the legal boundaries of law enforcement to seek justice deemed long overdue.
Netflix has a great record with true crime
Perhaps the best reason to watch The Breakthrough is Netflix’s strong record on true crime, both fiction and nonfiction. This is the streaming service that served up culture-capturing docuseries like Making a Murderer, The Keeper, American Nightmare, and The Program.
On the fiction side, Netflix originals like Ozark, Mindhunter, and Bodies have set a high standard for crime dramas that resist tropes and weave complex, chilling narratives that keep you on the edge of your seat.
Moreover, The Breakthrough is a tidy four episodes, so it’s a pretty easy watch to get through in a weekend.
Netflix does not miss with foreign acquisitions
Finally, Netflix has a great track record of importing foreign drama — especially provocative crime drama. Remember, Peaky Blinders was a BBC show before Netflix took it over. Netflix has done well repackaging the German thriller Dark, the U.K. dark comedy Baby Reindeer, and the French detective serial Lupin, not to mention perhaps the biggest show of 2021, South Korea’s Squid Game.