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An intense discussion lately went viral on social media, following someone posed the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where some males came online to inform women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.

Portraying the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part series is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly warm to his strict stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Soon collaborating opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent 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 religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.