Fortitude, Sky Atlantic, 9pm

After last week's feature length opening episode, it was hard not to come to two very clear conclusions about Sky Atlantic's all-star, big budget, Scandi-style crime noir. First, that it's actually quite bad. Second, that it's aptly named: fortitude is exactly the quality that's most going to be needed by anyone planning to sit through the entire 12 part series.

And what is Fortitude exactly? Well, it's a place, but it might also be an island, and it's located in a region that also has polar bears. This might be Norway - we glimpsed a Norwegian flag in the first episode one and the town's Northern Irish "sheriff" (Game Of Thrones star Richard Dormer) is referred to as being Norwegian in one scene. Or it might be somewhere else entirely. Somewhere that has a cornucopia of British regional accents and where a Scotland Yard detective who's actually an American can be flown in to investigate the murder which kicked things off last week.

As for the drama itself, it's Twin Peaks in fur-lined parkas, which is to say it's Fargo-meets-Northern Exposure-meets-Insomnia (the original, not the American remake). Or at least it's trying to be those things. Sadly it lacks the verve, the Lynchian vision, the Angelo Badalamenti score and Frances McDormand, so its weirdness ends up looking mannered and clunky. Not as clunky as the dialogue, though, the clunkiest example of which came when writer-creator Simon Donald shoehorned in a line explaining why the London detective (Stanley Tucci) was talking like an American. He used to work for the FBI, you see. Yeah, that works.

And yet, there is something oddly watchable about Fortitude. Mostly it's Tucci as suave, dogged investigator Eugene Morton, who pads about in the snow dressed like George Smiley on his way home from the Circus and turns up uninvited to post mortems. Dodgy accent aside, Dormer's pretty good too as police chief Dan Anderssen and let's not forget everybody's favourite Danish knitwear model Sofie Grabol, who plays Fortitude's double-dealing governor Hildur Odegard. Tonight, Morton meets more colourful characters, and Anderssen runs down missing miner Jason Donnelly (Aaron McCusker) who may or may not have something to do with the murder but who is definitely climbing under the sheets with comely scientist Natalie Yelburton (Sienna Guillory). In case you've forgotten, she's the one who had the gratuitous full-frontal nude scene last week.