To coincide with the
BBC television adaptation,
Wallander,
BBC Four began broadcasting the 2005 series to United Kingdom audiences.
Before the Frost and
Mastermind were shown in November 2008; broadcast of the others began weekly in July 2009. Reviewing
The Village Idiot and
The Brothers in the
Financial Times,
John Lloyd wrote: More evident is the philosophical underpinning that the books' author, Henning Mankell, brings, focusing down on the forensic work of a provincial detective the global sins of the western world. This coming week’s episode,
The Brothers, is a murder mystery emerging from a terrible crime perpetrated by a group of drunken men on colonised people; last week's,
The Village Idiot, had at its core the moral obloquy of a private surgeon greedy for profit. Wallander and his comrades seek what remedies they can to the consequences of the sins of oppression and greed. At one point, Wallander tells his daughter, Linda, who is applying to become a detective, that she should reflect—otherwise she, like him, will emerge from a tunnel 30 years later, wondering what had happened to life. What had happened for Wallander is a melancholy immersion in human degradation, a provincial Inferno without a Virgil to guide him. Writing in
Örnsköldsviks Allehanda after the release of
The Thief (2009), Peter Carlsson complained that only the first and last films of the successive series were any good, pointing out that these are the ones released to cinemas. Carlsson further criticised that the middle films "are often predictable, tentative and carelessly made", and that the arrest of the criminal is anticlimactic. As a series,
Wallander was nominated for The International TV Dagger at the 2009
Crime Thriller Awards, an awards ceremony presented by British television channel
ITV3 and the
Crime Writers' Association. Series 2 won the International TV Dagger at the 2010
Crime Thriller Awards, an awards ceremony presented by British television channel
ITV3 and the
Crime Writers' Association. ==DVD releases==