Is Broadchurch just like The Killing? It has taken six long years, since the first series of The Killing was broadcast in Denmark. But finally, with Broadchurch, British TV has caught up with our Scandinavian cousins. The ITV series, which concludes tonight with the unmasking of Danny Latimer's killer, has been nothing short of a revelation itself. It has learned, from The Killing, a simple structural lesson. Broadchurch, unlike any British TV whodunnit in recent memory, has taken a full eight episodes to solve just one murder. As The Killing showed, a long episode run makes - in and of itself - for more satisfying crime drama. In order simply to last that long, the case has to be more complex. The red herrings must be more numerous, the storytelling more accomplished. The writers, producers, directors and actors must work harder simply to keep the audience's attention. Broadchurch has also learned the Danish trick of trusting its viewers not just with a lot of episodes, but with slow-burning stories. The conventional British TV wisdom is that mainstream audiences simply won't stick around unless there's a fresh corpse or a loud car chase every 10 minutes. But stories that elapse almost in real time - like Sarah Lund's (Sofie Gråbøl) relationship with her sidekick Jan Meyer (Søren Malling) in The Killing, or DI Alec Hardy's (David Tennant) health problems in Broadchurch - reward the audience in a way that traditional two-hour UK detective shows never could. Most important of all, perhaps, is The Killing's lesson that emotions can be stories - powerful, lasting stories - almost in and of themselves. Both The Killing and Broadchurch examine the grief of a bereaved family, struggling to come to terms with the untimely death of a child. The motifs have become almost repetitive: the police detective in the victim's now-empty bedroom, or the grieving mother who struggles to complete everyday tasks. But the impact remains strong, because so few other TV dramas pause for breath long enough to let this kind of truth in. ITV have, for obvious reasons, kept tonight's final episode of Broadchurch a tightly controlled secret. Who can blame them? Not since "Who shot JR?" can I remember a TV mystery that so gripped the nation. And Broadchurch - perhaps wisely - has been created as a one-off series, which won't return for a sequel. But hopefully, now that its lessons have been so elegantly learned, there's another series whose DNA will crop up again in British TV. And that series is The Killing.