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An heated debate recently spread widely on social media, after a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly collaborating against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, where brutality, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, there are the many stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series is on Disney+ currently.