Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Mr. Good: Cop Or Crook?’ On Netflix, A Norwegian Docuseries About An Unorthodox But Successful Cop Who Was Busted For Drug Trafficking

 

 

Mr. Good: Cop Or Crook? is a four-part docuseries about Eirik Jensen, one of the most well-known police detectives in Norway, and the fact that he’s currently serving a 21-year prison sentence for drug trafficking charges. Directors Trond Kvig Andreassen and Ragne Riise speak to Jensen as well as a number of his police colleagues, and members of the motorcycle gangs that he got to know while he was undercover with them, to get to the bottom of whether the top cop in the country actually did the crime for which he’s doing time.

MR. GOOD: COP OR CROOK?: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A cassette is popped into a cassette player. A voice says “Shall we start from the beginning?”.

The Gist: Jensen, for his part, maintains his innocence. He feels he was framed by an informer named Gjermund Cappelen, a drug smuggler that he came to know in the 1990s, through his undercover and other police work with various motorcycle gangs.

The first episode describes just what kind of cop Jensen was: Old-school but unconventional. He felt that he’d get better information from bikers if he reached out to them, drank with them, and got to know them as people instead of hardened criminals. His approach was certainly controversial but got results, and he came to be known to the Norwegian public when he was put in charge of a task force that was supposed to reduce the violence amongst biker gangs that erupted in the mid ’00s.

But others were skeptical; are these informants — whom, of course, Jense

n and others flip to their side when with the promise of a lighter punishment for a crime — really snitching on their buddies or using these cops to help their enterprises? That’s the question that’s asked in the first episode as we hear about Jensen’s friendship with Cappelen, and how Cappelen may have tricked a Danish dealer Gunnar Evertsen into getting arrested after facilitating an air drop of 10kg of meth into Norway.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Mr. Good: Cop Or Crook? would have fit nicely into Vice’s docuseries Betraying The Badge, which was about corrupt cops.

Our Take: By having Eirik Jansen participating in this docuseries, directors Andreassen and Riise are trying to show how Jansen could be actually innocent of the various crimes that have landed him in what looks like a dorm room, but it’s actually a prison cell. Only Jansen really knows if he was set up or if he set up his informants to line his own pockets, but Mr. Good wants to have it both ways. It’s mostly successful, but sometimes gets muddled in its desire to play things down the middle.

The first episode paints a picture of a cop who looked more like a biker and acted more like one. There are pics of Jansen from the ’80s and early ’90s that show him drinking with MC members and looking like he spends his time as an enforcer, not a police detective. There is some lip service given to the fact that other countries and cities have tried the outreach method that Jansen espoused and weren’t successful, but the directors generally show that Jansen’s unorthodox methods got the job done.

The idea is that subsequent episodes are going to examine Jansen’s relationship with Cappelen, and how they may have used each other for personal enrichment, and then go over Jensen’s arrest, trial, conviction and appeal. But the first episode really doesn’t go into even a capsule of how Cappelen might have used Jansen or vice versa. This could be to get the viewers on Jensen’s side, or it could be just a function of having a little too much time to pad out the story. We’re not sure. But, as compelling as Jensen’s case is, this feels like an almost-four-hour story that could have been told in 3 hours or less.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: As we see Jensen on the stationary bike in his cell (!), Evertsen says “Did he know he was being used the whole time?”

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to the various mullets Jensen sported over the decades. Currently, he has short hair, but old pictures of him from the ’80s through the 2010s show him with various forms of long hair that are glorious to see.

Most Pilot-y Line: One of Jensen’s bosses says, “Other than being unorthodox and difficult to control, there were no big problems.” Uh, you just mentioned two pretty big problems, didn’t you?

Our Call: STREAM IT. Mr. Good: Cop Or Crook stumbles at times when trying to play both sides of Eirik Jensen’s case. But by giving such a two-sided picture, the directors have created a colorful narrative about an unorthodox cop.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.