‘Follow the Money: The Complete Season 2’ Review
If there is one enemy that we can all understand, it is the bank. Holding our money, we trust them to treat it well, but in recent years we’ve seen that sometimes that isn’t the case. Follow the Money season 2 sets up a story revolving around banks, and while this could have been a mediocre tale, this series manages to take it to epic proportions instead.
While I’ve not seen the first season of the show, the initial recap does a good job of introducing the main characters and the lay of the land regarding as to where the story is. Mads Justesen (Thomas Bo Larsen) and the fraud squad stumble onto a major crime that at first seems to be about making money out of bankrupt businesses, but soon becomes a conspiracy aimed at taking out a much bigger victim.
In season 2 of Follow the Money, Mads Justesen is very much the Ahab searching for the white whale. He’ll take down everybody around him just to get the result that he expects. Similarly we also have Claudia Moreno (Natalie Madueño) recently released from prison for her actions in the first season, who will do anything to take down Knud Christensen (Waag Sandø) the mastermind behind it all.
While Mads may have the authority to take down the fraudsters in the story, Claudia is the real powerhouse this season. Connecting herself to a bank which Christensen and his Nova Bank are trying to take over, she fights to help them survive against all the odds. In many ways though she is similar to Mads in her obsession, and gives little thought of who she takes down in her vendetta, which is her fatal flaw.
This season of Follow the Money is a game of two halves, and this does make you wonder just how the story could reach ten whole episodes, in fact it does feel like it should end at around five. What happens though after the halfway point is that the story is blown wide apart, and the audience are clued in on just how huge the fraud is.
What happens is that the show becomes even more engrossing, especially as the characters have been so well written and the scene has been set for the big reveal. Whether it be characters like Mads and Claudia or Nicky (Esben Smed Jensen) the likable or flawed henchman, they all have a part to play in what is to come.
What Follow the Money does well is to take a story that could have been bogged down in technical jargon and to give it just the right amount of detail as to let the audience know what is going on. It doesn’t treat us like idiots, but it also doesn’t over complicate the world of economics and banking. What this does is create some riveting television that ends up being hard to look away form.
Follow the Money Season 2 is a good example of what makes European television so good. This season has a little of everything, from fraud to murder and even in the chaos it manages to create some likable characters. Surprisingly epic in its scale, Follow the Money is a show you are unlikely to forget.
***** 5/5
Follow the Money: The Complete Season 2 is available on DVD in the UK now.