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An heated discussion lately spread widely on social media, after someone asked a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to inform women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Scenario

To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part drama is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Soon collaborating opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series is on Disney+ currently.