"Know your ending," declares Mårlind. "Anybody who says differently are lying. They don't know what they're doing." And realising that a show doesn't know its own ending, he adds, is not unlike discovering that Santa Claus doesn't exist.

"As a kid you know, you get surprised and sad when you realise Santa doesn't exist?" adds Mårlind. "I got that feeling as a grown up when I realised that Chris Carter had no idea what he was doing on The X-Files. I thought he had a master plan, [but] no, he was just hoping to get another season."

That, to some extent, informs the thinking behind giving Scandi noir stories such as The Bridge and the pair's new series Midnattssol – in English, Midnight Sun – stories which are close-ended. "If people want to make a second season, fine, but we told this story," Mårlind says. "We're done."

In laying down a blueprint for the series, which is set in a remote corner of Sweden and follows a murder investigation in which French police officer Kahina Zadi (Leïla Bekhti) is partnered with Sami policeman Anders Harnesk (Gustaf Hammarsten), the pair say they rarely begin with the crime itself.

"We always start with theme, where do we want to go? What do we want to tell?" Mårlind says. "When we did The Bridge we said we want to tell something about the lies that we create to close our eyes to the shit that's all around us. We want to have a killer that puts up a mirror into the audience say, look how ugly you are."

That same social thread carries through into Midnight Sun, he adds. "We want to say something about Europe today, that it's turning ugly. America as well, you know, with all the Trump shit going on."

What the pair found in a remote corner of Sweden, where the sun never sets, was a "microcosm where there's this thing going on between the Swedes and our indigenous people the Sami, we realised that we can tell something very local about this that maybe gives a big picture of Europe today and even the world," Mårlind says.

After that, comes the crime, the pair add. "You create the murder, the grisliness, the horror, which is the vessel that people want to get in to see," Mårlind says. "Nobody wants to see a film or a series about social commentary. That's boring. You want to see who the killer is, right?"

Stein says the story's themes are universal, touching on the indigenous experience all over the world. "Australia, New Zealand, or South America, North America, Africa, that conflict is everywhere where, you know, the indigenous people have been pushed away," he says. "That's one thing that we are happy to just shed a light on. Hopefully it will shed some light somewhere else."

While the pair acknowledge there are responsibilities which come with the portrayal of indigenous cultures on television, their focus was on bringing visibility to a culture which is largely invisible in modern Sweden.

"Nobody is talking about them, they were here first, you know?" says Mårlind. "So just getting to the room and talk you know, with everyone else, I think that's the main thing. A discussion will take place, because in Sweden there's never been any reconciliation, there have been no apologies from the Swedish government. This, hopefully, will shake things around a little bit."

Equally, adds Stein, they tried not to make the indigenous culture exotic. "What was very important for us was not to put them on a pedestal and to make them too goody-two-shoes and fantastic either, because they're not," says Stein. "They're humans. Some of them are assholes. Some of them are funny. Some of them are great. You have to show that."

The topic of Scandi noir itself – the genre borne out of hit Scandinavian shows such as Forbrydelsen (The Killing) Broen (The Bridge) and Borgen, a political thriller set in Christiansborg Palace – is a little tricker to navigate. Both Mårlind and Stein understand it, but point out that it isn't a big topic of discussion within the Scandi television production community.

"We don't sit down and talk about it, it's in our DNA," says Mårlind. "It's like street kids from Brazil, you know, they play football in a certain way. They don't think about it. That's just how they do it and suddenly they become really good at it. It's just how we are brought up."

What has changed, Stein adds, is that with success has come a greater confidence in telling stories. "Because there's been some success and then with success comes confidence," he says. "We're quite reserved people I think in that sense, but once somebody's told us something like this it gives the confidence."

The success of Scandi noir internationally has put many of the genre's best shows on channels in the US, the UK and Australia. In the US, however, there is also an appetite for remake, a topic which makes both Mårlind and Stein smile. "You have no control," Mårlind says. "You create a monster and let it go. It's fun."

That said, both point out that the US adaptation of The Bridge made one error of interpretation in choosing the US-Mexico border over the US-Canada border as its setting, a choice no doubt informed by both the geographical texture of the border and the media emphasis on its security.

"The whole idea was telling a story about these countries that are similar," Mårlind says, referring to the Øresund Bridge which connects Sweden's Malmö and Denmark's Copenhagen. "It should have been Canada, because then it would be true to the idea of the show," he adds. "They screwed up there I think. They forgot what the soul of the show was."

WHAT Midnight Sun

WHEN Available at SBS On Demand