The Killing - Ironically Still Not Dead

How's this for a shocker - AMC's The Killing is coming back for a fourth season, despite having been cancelled twice already.

The show made an incredibly strong start, but soon degenerated into a bit of a mess, eschewing the standard accepted mystery practice of giving us a cast full of suspects in favour of rather bafflingly deciding to present only one suspect at a time leaving the viewer never without doubt that the supposed killer in any given episode was of course innocent because there were still episodes to go.

This somewhat daft approach, coupled with a baffling decision to stretch the initial case out for a second season even though it was all but solved, which lead to a messy second run that spent far too much time backtracking established facts from the first season, caused AMC to cancel the show.

A decision that they retracted, leading to a third season that few people even knew about - especially in the UK, when C4 refused to stump up for the latest batch of episodes. Unsurprisingly, despiet a pretty favourable reception to the thrid season, the show was cancelled again.

Only now Netflix - fast becoming a legitimate giant of original programming, with the fourth season of Arrested Development and four upcoming Marvel shows to their name, amongst others - have stepped in to give the show a six-episode final run, following on from their help in the production of the third season.

This is a very surprising move, as public demand for more of The Killing can hardly have been huge.

All six episodes will be made available in one chunk - a strong move, as the show is infinitely better when viewed in marathon form, as opposed to once a week - though no release date has yet been set.