Piece of My Heart

At its core, the Finnish mystery series Piece of My Heart is a tale of two social workers. Rita the battle-weary veteran acts as both inspiration and foil for her bright-eyed new colleague, Laura. A notable element of the series is that it passes the Bechtel test many times over. It features two women who talk to each other at length about work, professionalism, and boundaries as well as the misadventures of their young clients.

Men get short shrift in the story. The boss of the child welfare unit, Jyrki, is nominally in charge but for the most part does not engage in the real work of the place, to the extent that he may be willing to compromise the department’s fundamental mission. Laura’s husband operates in the space often left to wives in cop shows or sports movies, constantly complaining about how much his partner works. Meanwhile, Rita long ago abandoned her search for a normal home life, instead dedicating herself to her clients—to the point that she has trouble telling where her life ends and theirs begin.

When we meet Rita, she has so thoroughly lost her way that she is under investigation for the disappearance of a child in her care. She got too close to the child’s father, and clearly started to view herself as a substitute mother. She is devastated by the loss and desperate to find the girl. The question of what happened to little Elli Saarni is the overarching mystery of the series. Tucked into this larger structure, the individual episodes concentrate on the struggles of several other children in the welfare system and the attempts Rita and Laura make to help them out.

The show is riveting, mainly because it gets the central questions plaguing Rita and Laura exactly right. How much of themselves should they be devoting to the job? Did Rita’s dedication make her great at what she does or did it ruin her life? Should Laura follow her example or should she put more boundaries in place to prioritize her home life? If you know anyone in a helping profession, these are dilemmas they face all the time. It rings absolutely true as a focus of people in this world.

I can’t think of too many examples of American shows that focus on social work. Cop shows, yes. Shows with a hospital setting, sure. You get the occasional series about teachers that touches on similar themes. But something set in a child welfare office? I can recall the odd social worker character on Law & Order, usually related to the foster system producing some disastrous result, but that’s about it. It’s striking to me that what comes up when you do an internet search for shows about social work are documentaries. Presumably, the subject is enough of a downer that it is relegated to the non-fiction end of the TV spectrum. But as Piece of My Heart demonstrates, it is a career rife with drama.

Social work is viewed very differently in the U.S. and Finland. Nordic countries take greater pride in their social safety net. Race is much less of a factor in the wider narrative of who needs help and why—making for more of a consensus about the value of the enterprise—although this is changing as more immigrants arrive in northern countries. Piece of My Heart provides stinging commentary on the privatization of social services, no doubt because there is more local pressure to follow an American model these days. The showrunners make what seems like a conscious decision to largely leave race and ethnicity out of the equation. Most of the children in trouble in this fictional Helsinki are white Europeans, which has the effect of universalizing problems such as substance abuse or mental health issues or just being part of an unhappy family. I kept having fleeting thoughts about, e.g., the racial make-up of the U.S. opioid crisis as I watched.

The character of Rita is not a wholly unfamiliar one, though the sort of obsessive heroic dedication she represents is more reminiscent of the role of the teacher in the American media landscape. Is it that social work is too associated with institutionalized hopelessness here for us to ascribe that kind of romanticism to the profession? Of course, teachers in the U.S. complain that the sort of heroic media portrait they receive is in reality the expectation for them to overcome societal failures like poverty and lack of adequate health care or family support, which they cannot do. I recently learned that this kind of expectation is so widespread in helping professions that there is a term for it: vocational awe.

Because it is not an American show, Piece of My Heart does not assume off the bat that the social workers’ efforts are bound to fail. On the contrary, it suggests that if you view people in need as perfectly real, with concerns of their own however opaque to outsiders, you may be able to penetrate the layers of damage and secrecy that prevent them from leading the lives they want. Though there is plenty of dread about the possibility of failure and relapse—about the intractability of social problems—there is a seed of hope here, too. A lot of the revelations have to do with self-knowledge, with casting off other people’s perceptions and finding your own sense of self. Since the story generally has a feminist sensibility, it makes sense that some of the power the child or teenage clients discover is in recognizing oppressive systems, whether they are operating in the family or in romantic relationships or society at large, and finding their own path out. Looking to adults you can really trust is important, as is making and keeping the right kind of friends. You want people in your life who can reflect back realistic and helpful possibilities, at any age.

This series tackles big questions within its limited, suspenseful scope—and succeeds brilliantly. I cannot remember the last time I watched a mystery that packed as much social punch. I’m sure it helps that the protagonists are not cops. The simple decision to focus on child welfare opened up an enormous and worthwhile avenue of exploration, while managing to avoid melodrama amid its emotional themes. I expect I’ll be thinking about it for a long time to come.