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Kenneth Branagh (My Week with Marilyn, Henry V, Hamlet) returns to Masterpiece Mystery! as Inspector Kurt Wallander, the moody Swedish detective created by mystery writer Henning Mankell, who famously lit the spark for today’s passionate interest in Scandinavian crime fiction.

Masterpiece Mystery! presents three new 90-minute whodunits on Wallander III, airing Sundays, September 9, 16, and 23, 8:00 p.m. on KUED.

“Kenneth Branagh outdoes himself in series 3,” says Executive Producer Rebecca Eaton. “No one else matches him in sheer soul-stirring emotion. In our long list of favorite detectives, Kurt Wallander is one of the most fascinating.”

After an Emmy®- and Golden Globe®-nominated debut season in 2009, the second Wallander series was judged just as gripping and refreshingly different as the first. USA Today hailed it as “an adult, modern mystery designed for those who want their murder stories to land somewhere between cozy and hopelessly dark.”

The depressed detective himself might beg to differ. “I'm basically quite a cheerful person!” Wallander insists to a dubious colleague in the opening episode of the new season. But his inner sunny outlook is trapped in unremitting Nordic gloom.

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