What a viewStranger: Netflix K-drama rewards patience in second season of slow police procedural

“A little less conversation, a little more action, please,” sang Elvis Presley, even though he probably hadn’t spent the evening watching Netflix crime thriller Stranger.

The shoot-’em-up police procedural is all very well, but might not always reflect real life too accurately. So if dour, long-faced reality is your bag, you can always depend on the latest Scandi-noir offering – or this, its South Korean cousin. Now in its second series, Stranger is still playing the long game with its audience, going down the intriguing plot route to justice rather than rushing to judgment via a handy shootout, car chase or firebombed courthouse.

Which is fine, as long as you have the patience to follow the sometimes glacial narrative as it slides imperceptibly towards a conclusion. Is it worth investing an hour every Saturday and another on Sunday all the way into October?

If your bag also embraces police-on-police murder made to look like suicide, sexual tension simmering on a low heat while trying to break through sedimentary layers of stereotypical national reserve and embarrassment, and beat cops taking bribes from the owners of squalid dive bars, then yes, indubitably.

This time round the story begins on a fittingly foggy, damp night with the drownings of a couple of drunken students. “Beach closed” signs have been removed, but because they’ve been tampered with by a repulsively greasy, rich and well-connected couple no prosecution follows. After these relative fireworks, the lid of a whole oil drum of worms is slowly peeled back, while a new Police-Prosecution Council is convened to sort out who has jurisdiction over what.

The can opener is wielded by that police show standard-bearer of truth, honesty, sobriety and other good habits, the socially awkward semi-hick disliked by all those with something to hide, especially his superiors.