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A intense discussion lately went viral on social media, after someone asked the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males took to the internet to tell women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.

Portraying the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Soon collaborating opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows 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 led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, there are the many stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears offered by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.