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An heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman 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 conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from the wild or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, there are numerous tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series streams on Disney+ now.