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A heated discussion recently went viral on social media, after someone asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Soon in cahoots opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are determined proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’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 provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series streams on Disney+ now.