Fortitude (Series 1) is a pretty poor effort that desperately needs the services of a decent editor. The story doesn't gradually unfold, as some have suggested, but limps along at a truly glacial pace. It's an over-stylised, pretentious, poorly constructed drama, bogged down in pointless soap opera sub-plots and was clearly designed to cash-in on the current success of Scandinavian drama. The whole thing feels like a cynical, designed-by-committee, Nordic Noir facsimile, and even the casting of Stanley Tucci feels like a desperate marketing ploy designed to drum up some viewer interest in the USA.However, Tucci's performance is by far the best thing in this clunker and he manages to deliver some terrible dialogue with considerable aplomb. It's not enough to save this production, but at least he had a good try. The rest of the cast deliver little in the way of believability, but to be fair they didn't have a lot to work with. Michael Gambon clearly had fun chewing the scenery, but Christopher Eccleston's talents were entirely wasted.The absolute core and central theme of Fortitude is a pretty decent idea, and if you happen to have a time machine lying around that you're not actually using at the moment, could you please send the script back to John Carpenter on or around 1980. I'm pretty sure he could make a excellent film out of this. But 12 x 50 minute episodes? No chance. There's simply not enough story to support that much air time.I can't comment on series two as I have absolutely no intention of wasting any more time on this nonsense. So, 3/10 - a reasonably decent (although somewhat derivative) idea for a series that was badly constructed and poorly executed.

I'll give this show a 9 for the first season and a 2 for the 2nd. That's how terrible the drop-off is.The first season is creepy, weird, scary and especially, intriguing. You want to know who these people are, what their back story is and what will happen to them and to the town. Very good acting for the most part combined with bleak landscape and ominous music made me feel compelled to watch this season obsessively and with interest. When it finally ends you feel exhausted, as spent as the characters seem to be. Great season!In fact, so much so that I hesitated to watch the 2nd season, so weary in a way was I of the grim happenings I had witnessed. But watch I did, or rather, the first 3.1 episodes only. A horrible let down, a story line that holds little interest, a seeming rehash of the first season with no compelling story line and characters that were good initially given nothing to work with and the bad ones given enough to show how bad they are. Awful! Skip season 2.

The first half of season one, I couldn't understand the negative reviews. The cast, acting, direction, location, story line was good. As the show progressed it got gruesome. By the end of the fist season it seemed clear, everyone dies. There wasn't a single positive event or character in the entire show. When they killed a 10 year old girl, I was done. Why bother to even consider season two, to watch every character either murder someone, have an accident, or commit suicide. Instead of watching in hopes it turned better, it progressively got worse.This show represents everything that's wrong with entertainment in the 21st Century. It does not contain anything positive.

Every component of Fortitude has been done before, much better and a lot quicker than this agonizingly slow series.You get the feeling early that there is something unreal going on in the isolated Arctic town of Fortitude. The brutal and bizarre deaths are investigated by Dan Anderssen (Richard Dormer)and you can tell he knows something. There is a visiting detective from London, a Governor trying to launch a business venture and a few other characters that are mildly interesting. The problem is that this show moves at a snails pace and is very confusing to follow. Others watching with me fell asleep.I think if you took the movie The Thing, stretch the movie out to 25 episodes, and mixed in some scenes from Fargo you would have a series very much like but a whole lot better than Fortitude.