Fortitude is Broadchurch with polar bears, True Detective on ice, Fargo with hot sex and Twin Peaks with woolly mammoths. It's scary and baffling and spectacular. But none of that is the most extraordinary thing about the series that starts tonight on ABC1. What's amazing is the cast, and the way a peculiar project devised by a little-known screenwriter was able to pull in the cream of the acting talent of Europe and America.

There's Stanley Tucci, best known as the sadistic host from The Hunger Games; Michael Gambon, who was Dumbledore in most of the Harry Potter series; Sofie Grabol, the relentless investigator in the Danish version of The Killing; Christopher Eccleston, a former Dr Who; and Jessica Raine, who left the leading role in Call The Midwife to be a murder suspect in Fortitude.

There were two prime persuaders: the fact that television has become "the new movies" and the opportunity to film in Iceland. As Gambon, who plays an alcoholic photographer (and suspect and potential victim), puts it: "Television is completely different now, it's as good as film. It's beating film. It's intelligent and well shot, so it's no concession for an actor to work in TV. There's such good stuff being made, you can't resist it."

Grabol, who plays a sinister politician, took on Fortitude as her first TV job after treatment for breast cancer in 2013. "Michael Gambon in The Singing Detective made a huge impression on me when I was young, and I admire Stanley Tucci greatly," she says. "The possibility of working with these fantastic actors was just amazing. Plus, I haven't played many characters in power, and the role of Governor Odegard immediately appealed to me. The mind of a power-seeking person was an interesting one to work with."

Tucci plays a detective sent from London to investigate the first major crime in what is supposed to be the safest town on earth (apart from the hungry bears): "He's the ultimate outsider and Fortitude isn't a place that welcomes outsiders easily or warmly. He's there to investigate this murder and it's like pulling teeth to get information out of anyone. He has entered into what is, in essence, a kind of big dysfunctional family."

Fortitude is the most extreme example so far of a TV genre that has come to be known as "remote noir". The original "film noir" thrillers were set in the mean streets of decaying cities such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco and London. True Detective took the menacing mood of those films and moved it to the sweaty swamps of Florida. Fargo transported it to the snowy plains of Minnesota. Broadchurch shipped it to the cliffs of Dorset. Fortitude carries it to the North Pole.

The creator, Simon Donald, previously known for a cop series called Low Winter Sun, says his aim is to produce a crime mini-series that is  "distinctive".

"I was keen to find a place where I could set a dark, twisted thriller that was unlike any location we'd seen recently – and that took us right up into the Arctic Circle," he says. "I also wanted to write something set in a very small, pressure-cooker community where people are left to their own devices and have to sort things out themselves when something goes wrong."

To add to the distinctiveness, Donald killed off a key character (and famous actor) in the first episode: "Audiences are sophisticated and the audience I'm writing for watches the kind of shows I love – The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Deadwood and Game of Thrones. A feature of those shows is that you just don't know who's going to get knocked off next. Nobody is safe simply because they're a famous actor or because they're playing a likeable character.

"So I was looking to find the most unexpected combination of murderer and victim that I could come up with in this little world, and that was important because it's great fun to be wrong-footed. Who did it is never the full story – why they did it is what you care about."

Fortitude is on ABC1 on Sunday, February 15, at 9.20pm, after the start of Broadchurch, season 2.

Not so impenetrable
Fortitude is not the only British TV drama that has managed to attract a legend of the big screen. Broadchurch's second season, starting tonight, features Charlotte Rampling as a retired barrister who agrees to prosecute the alleged child-killer from series one. Rampling lives in France, and had seen the first two episodes of series one, dubbed in French, before she got involved in season 2.

"The dubbed version was very good: you felt the Englishness of it. It really was quite powerful," she says. "And it did incredibly well, they just adore Broadchurch in France. I think the reason the French liked it so much is the same reason everyone loves it – the sense of community, the idea of solidarity in a small town and all that is broken when suspicion starts to creep in."

Rampling says she was welcomed by the already established team of actors, including David Tennant. "I don't quite know why but sometimes people are apprehensive about meeting me. Maybe people think I might be a bit impenetrable or a bit fierce, but it is not true and people easily see that I'm just as fun-loving as anyone else."

Olivia Colman, who plays the cop whose husband is on trial, revealed Rampling's secret weapon: "Charlotte Rampling is amazing. I was nervous about meeting her as she is a proper legend, but she is so sweet and brought everybody a box of chocolates on her last day."

Broadchurch begins on ABC1 on February 15 at 8.30pm, just before Fortitude.

Neill's War
Sam Neill plays Lang Hancock in House of Hancock, and we'll get to that in a moment, but lately he's been thinking about Gallipoli – not the brilliant series showing on Nine on Monday nights, but the place that changed the way Australians and New Zealanders see themselves. Neill has just completed a 90-minute documentary that will be part of the ABC's coverage of the Anzac centenary. It's been on his mind because of the public reaction to Tony Abbott's awarding of a knighthood to an English prince, sending a message that is exactly the opposite of the message in the documentary Neill co-wrote.

"A lot of my family were soldiers, and it's a personal kind of ramble as much as anything – a sort of meditation about why we think so much about Anzac Day, Gallipoli, the effect that war has on families," Neill says.

"We realised that the British didn't necessarily have our best interests at heart, that we needed to be and think independently. We realised there was more in common between Australia and New Zealand than with anywhere else, in spite of our weird preoccupation with competing on various sports grounds.

"It begins there, our sense of separation from Empire. Unless you're Aboriginal or Maori, we all felt we were British up to that point. There was a sort of propaganda to which we subscribed –  that the greatest force for civilisation in the world was the British Empire – and a lot of it was actually fantasy.

"The fantasy was finally dispelled when the British joined the Common Market and we were toast. It's interesting now that there's a big move in England to leave Europe and re-establish those ties with the old Commonwealth. I would have thought, especially given the events in Australia in the last couple of weeks, that ship sailed many years ago. Those days are over."

OK, now back to the mini-series at hand. In part one of House of Hancock, seen last week by nearly 2 million Australians, Lang bullied his daughter Gina. In part two, showing tonight, Neill thinks we'll have more sympathy for him.

"I don't think there's a villain in this piece, or a hero for that matter," Neill says. "It's a very complicated family, but vivid and larger than life. You couldn't make this stuff up.

"There are aspects of the Lang character that I can empathise with – enormous frustration with things as they turn out, getting old, getting frail, losing control. In the second episode, it's the decline and fall, as far as he's concerned. There are Shakespearean undertones or overtones, if you like. It becomes a battle of the titans and quite wrenching too."

House of Hancock, part two, airs on Nine on February 15 at 8.45pm. The Waves of Anzac Cove will be on ABC in April.

For more, go to smh.com.au/entertainment/blog/the-tribal-mind.