"The Thing" meets "The Killing/Forbrydelsen" is such a neat summation of Sky Atlantic and Pivot's drama that for the first few episodes it's possible to be rather underwhelmed. Couple that with the glacial pace (funny 'cos it's set on a glacier!) and the deliberately moody, secretive atmosphere in which every single character has a shady past and/or a hidden agenda, and it's a show that requires patience and, well, a little fortitude to get into. But the story of the fictional eponymous town in isolated Arctic Norway does gradually work into its own groove, allowing interpersonal dramas to unfold against the backdrop of a potentially supernatural threat. Even the variously twisted backstories start to make an uncanny kind of sense: this is a manufactured international community — people who have run literally to the ends of the earth to set up shop in one of the most inhospitable regions on earth — so of course they're all a bit odd. Starring Sofie Gråbøl, a terrific Stanley Tucci, Richard Dormer, Sienna Guillory, Michael Gambon and Luke Treadaway amongst its fine ensemble, it also has a delightfully/disgustingly un-fainthearted approach to gore, and a gratifying instinct for killing off characters we've come to like at exactly the moment we might be getting a bit restless. Happily, it's been picked up for a second season.