Nordic noir as comfort television

The title of my last post made me think of the crime mystery I'm watching at the moment.  It's an Icelandic drama called Trapped, but this seems merely to refer to what tends to happen in more remote areas of Iceland over winter, i.e anywhere that's not Reykjavik gets snowed in.  A chopped up body washes ashore just as a ferry from Denmark shows up to the town.  What they call a ferry, we'd call a cruise ship - this thing is BIG - and it becomes the focus of police attention, but the special task force can't get there from Reykjavik and it's left to the local cops. The last job they did was give somebody a ticket for parking in front of a fire hydrant.  

Cops on TV always have such messed up personal lives, whether it's New York or a remote snowed in town in Iceland.  And the police chief's children are horrible!  That's a refreshing change from American shows where small children are often portrayed as unrealistically adorable.

Also an interesting trait I've seen with several Nordic shows now;  if the characters are speaking the native language with each other, whether it's Swedish, Danish, Finnish or Icelandic, they use English subtitles.  If they're speaking to a character of another nationality, everybody starts talking English.  Soon as the Russian/Danish/whatever leaves the scene, it's back to their own language and subtitles.  I thought that was interesting.  Btw, Russians seem to show up frequently as bad guys.