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An heated debate lately spread widely on social media, following someone asked the question for females: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.

Portraying the Scenario

To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which violence, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and faith, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors presented by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series is on Disney+ now.