Adam is properly outraged, insisting that something has to be done, that Robin has to be reported to the police. Ulrika is equally dismayed but acutely aware of the further trauma that Stella will face if the law becomes involved and proposes that they do nothing. The legal system that is supposed to be supporting her isn’t programmed to address her interests alone.

Four years pass and it emerges that the family portrait behind the opening credits provides only an illusion of togetherness. The parents believe that they’ve failed their daughter and their relationship is under stress. And Stella’s psychologist (Sanna Persson Halapi) asks her patient, “How do you think it might’ve been if they’d reacted differently?”

Superficially, Stella seems to have survived her ordeal. She’s still outgoing and flirtatious, her very forward wooing of a seemingly charming man about town (Christian Fandango Sundgren) repeating the same pattern of behaviour that previously put her in danger.

However, she’s now keeping her distance from the parents in whom she once confided. And when the police arrive, take her away and charge her with the murder of someone they’ve never even heard of, they’re totally bewildered.

Carefully structured, the series pivots on all of its characters’ flawed negotiations with the circumstances in which they find themselves. None is entirely innocent, but most are not unequivocally culpable either. Stella’s parents’ attempts to help her place them at odds with the legal system. Mitigating circumstances undermine certainties, revelations pile up, and information is strategically withheld, with the resultant plot gaps gradually filled via flashbacks.

The order of the lives they want to be living is constantly being disrupted by what they do. Repeatedly, their entry into an establishing shot of a setting is followed by a cut to hand-held coverage of their subsequent movements, making it seem as if, just by arriving on the scene, they’ve upset some pre-arranged order.

Recurrent shots of them passing through enclosed corridors makes it seem as if the world around is constantly pressing in on them.

For its part, as illustrated by the initial exchange between Stella’s parents, the law is ill-equipped to deal with the situations that envelop the characters. The definitions of guilt and innocence that govern its representatives’ conduct emerge as an inadequate measure of the situations they’re dealing with.

The series thoughtfully examines the legal process from the outside, situating us alongside those who are affected by it in one way or another. However Jörnlind’s earlier The Truth Will Out, set in Stockholm, the nation’s capital, scrutinises it from within.

The plot pivots on the work of a cold-case unit under the supervision of Peter Wendel (Robert Gustafsson). He’s recently back on the job after a breakdown, which is at least partially a consequence of the guilt he feels over the apparent suicide of his brother.

That continues to plague him and, as is the way in such dramas, he and his deeply disturbed quarry (Peter Carlberg) are depicted as having much in common, a point unnecessarily made explicit in the first season’s final episode.

Peter has three others in his team, which, it gradually becomes clear, has been set up primarily to sideline misfits (not unlike Slough House in Apple TV+’s Slow Horses). Jorma (Christopher Wagelin) has handed in his resignation from the force and is soon to become a real-estate agent.

Caijsa (Louise Peterhoff), whom Jorma had reported to Internal Affairs for absconding with money seized during an arrest, is facing dismissal. And Barbro (Ia Langhammer) is a seconded secretary who initially appears more devoted to her dog than her career.

While they’re all going about the business of bonding, as outsiders often do, the rest of the force and the judicial system are in various states of disarray. After Peter’s team calls into question a serial killer’s confession, their immediate superiors are forced to recognise that the crimes they’d reduced to a neat little package are much more complicated.

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At a higher level of authority, the Justice Minister (Johan Ulveson) and his department, which includes Peter’s sympathetic ex-wife, Ann-Marie (Maria Sundbom Lörelius), talk the talk but are more interested in covering their backs and ensuring they’re all “on the same page” than in delivering due process.

“We’re working on a draft law that will improve legal certainty throughout the EU,” the minister proudly tells Ann-Marie, whom he’s trying to persuade to become his chief of staff. “You know how it is in some places: indignation and emotion are prioritised over objectivity and forensic evidence.”

Both series serve as potent reminders that while the law might be a society’s way of keeping chaos at bay, it’s a fragile institution and its mission is almost always compromised. It’s constantly getting things wrong, whether because of the fallibility of its representatives, or their corruption, or because of a perceived need for black-and-white rules when the events under investigation are better understood in shades of grey.

It’s no surprise to learn that Joe Berlinger, probably best known for his groundbreaking Paradise Lost documentary trilogy (1996-2011, Binge), about a serious miscarriage of justice in West Memphis, Arkansas, has embarked on a US remake of The Truth Will Out.

A Nearly Normal Family is on Netflix.

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