The Breakthrough Review 2025 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
We’re so used now to series on streaming services like Netflix lasting for eight episodes and, because of that length, padding out the story to the nth degree. A flashback here, a flashback there, and a flashback to a flashback over there… streaming services have a habit of going around in circles a bit. Brevity isn’t always their strong point.
So hurrah for The Breakthrough (Genombrottet in its native tongue), a Swedish series on Netflix that only lasts for four episodes. And the episodes are relatively short, too.
It’s an adaptation of a true crime, apparently the second the second-largest criminal investigation in Swedish history.
We start in the early 2000s, in the city of Linköping, almost slap-bang between Gothenburg and Stockholm, and an early morning like many others. A young boy walks to school but is brutally attacked and stabbed to death in a park by a man wearing a hat. Rushing to the boy’s aid is a middle-aged woman, who is also taken out in brutal fashion.
On the case is homicide detective John (Peter Eggars) – I don’t think his surname was ever mentioned – who is convinced they’ll have their man soon enough: there’s a witness, and they have the murder weapon and a hat worn by the assailant. The case corresponds with his wife giving birth to their first child, but – as we’ve seen with so many other TV detectives – he becomes obsessed with the case, especially as his initial confidence turns into, well, something less than confidence.
Even though this is a genuinely true story, there are so many familiar tropes here – the obsessed detective, the failed marriage, the estranged/neglected child… and so it goes on.
In the middle of the series, we jump forward a year and then 10 in, literally, the blink of an eye (or a musical montage in this case), and then, finally, 15 years later where the crime is still unsolved, and John even more frantic. Especially as he’s told that he only has two weeks left before the case is handed over to the cold case team. (Surely this would’ve been handed over waaaay before then?)
But then a hallelujah moment – John reads about how a new kind of DNA search, which uses genealogy, helped to catch a serial killer in the US. He then searches for anyone in Sweden who uses this method, and lo and behold, he finds Per (Mattias Nordkvist), who is desperate to share his work with others.
Together they feverishly try to crack the DNA code, not least because Per uses public records to trace family DNA, which is deemed – or will be in a couple of days – illegal. So they have to work quickly.
This enforced deadline does raise the stakes a little and gives the series some excitement and edge-of-your-seatness. However, at only four episodes long things are over in a flash, and characters aren’t fully formed. A sweet spot of six episodes might have been perfect.
Like many other true crime adaptations, The Breakthrough is restricted by the facts of the case. It does a nice job of giving the victims and the victims’ families a voice (something that Nordic Noir generally does very well), but there are no real twists to speak of – it’s more of a faithful retelling. If it had been a work of fiction, there were ample opportunities to kill Per off and really put a spanner in the works.
All in all though, The Breakthrough is an interesting piece of work and a solid watch.
