How to Be Danish: A Journey to the Cultural Heart of Denmark (15 page)

The first two series of
The Killing
ended up on BBC4, and I visited the set of the third while it was in post-production. Around half a million Brits watched each of the earlier instalments – a startling figure for such a moody, complex, subtitled piece of Scandi noir.

“I thought: what is this?” says the show’s creator, Søren Sveistrup, who was sitting with his kids by a pool in Thailand when he first heard the British viewing figures. “We’re a very small country – five-point-something million – and it’s impossible to make people who don’t understand Danish watch our shows. It made me really proud. There were all these publishers writing to me. Could they buy
The Killing
? Was it a novel? It was kind of amazing.”

Hot on the trail of
The Killing
(known in Denmark as
Forbrydelsen
, or
The Crime
) came
Borgen
, a show about a female prime minister. Odd as it may sound, this dramatisation of Scandinavian coalition politics proved an even bigger hit in Britain than
The Killing
, regularly pulling in three-quarters of a million viewers. And then there was
The Bridge
, which, with a staggering one million UK fans, was even more popular in Britain than it was in Denmark and Sweden. Each of them stars a strong woman in a position of authority – a reflection of Scandinavia’s slightly more enlightened attitude to gender equality.

In
The Killing
, Sarah Lund wears the same clothes for days on end, doesn’t wear make-up, and puts her work before her fiancé, mother and son – behaviour which, says Bernth, wasn’t particularly surprising to a Danish audience.

“We recognise that woman,” says Bernth. “She’s very obsessed with her work and she wants to make a difference. And I think we kind of like that.”

Overseas, Bernth notes, audiences have reacted differently – and
she cites the time the German distributors doctored a copy of the series poster, which shows Lund standing with her arms crossed, looking moody.

“They thought: ‘Woah. God. She looks angry and boring. Ugly jumper. Woah, what do we do?’ And in Photoshop they changed her, and gave her a bra and a see-through shirt. I was like: ‘WHAT?’ And so I got on my email and stopped it immediately.”

Britain took to these shows mainly because they are a) slightly exotic; and b) simply good television: gripping, well scripted, beautifully shot and brilliantly acted. But in Denmark, the reasons are more complex. These three shows are fictional, but they deal with issues that cut right to the heart of real-life Danish politics.
Borgen
, most obviously. Its portrayal of a female prime minister predicted the election, in 2011, of Helle Thorning-Schmidt. The show dared to imagine what the electorate – for all Denmark’s progressive attitudes to gender equality – had not been able to in 2007: a woman in charge. Meanwhile, the battle Birgitte Nyborg faces in
Borgen
to stay true to her family mirrors the real-life experiences of Lars Løkke Rasmussen, Thorning-Schmidt’s predecessor. Halfway through his tenure, realising that he had become estranged from his family, Rasmussen suddenly took two weeks off to be with his children – sparking a national debate about the responsibilities of the prime minister.

Unlike
Borgen
,
The Killing
is not exclusively a political drama, but it is just as plugged into politics. The plot of the
second season centres on a series of small-scale terrorist attacks, apparently carried out by Muslim extremists. At first, the series implicitly questions whether these events were sparked by Denmark’s aggressive role in Iraq and Afghanistan – the Danes’ first acts of overseas aggression since the national catastrophe of 1864. Then, even more provocatively, the show entertains the possibility that these attacks were perpetrated not by Muslims, but by ethnic Danes. It is a plotline that seemed eerily prophetic when, two years later, the far-right activist Anders Breivik slaughtered hundreds of young Norwegians across the Baltic in Oslo.

The Killing
’s first series did not deal with foreign policy, but is just as deft in its treatment of domestic issues. As a police procedural, it’s excellent – but the murder investigation is in many ways just a vehicle for exploring different aspects of Danish society. As old suspects prove their innocence and new ones emerge,
The Killing
moves from a portrayal of Danish family life to an analysis of Denmark’s education system, before finally reaching Copenhagen city hall, and a discussion of coalition politics.

All the while, it questions Danish attitudes to immigration. One of the main characters is an Asian teacher called Rama. In a country where foreigners find it hard to fit in, Rama has done everything right: he married a Dane, he became a teacher and he fought against religious oppression. But it’s still not enough. When there is the slightest, unlikeliest hint that he may somehow be involved in the murder,
Rama is immediately ostracised, even spat at by his students.

“He was well integrated,” says Sveistrup. “He did what all the white guys told him to do. But when it came down to it, was he accepted? No. And that was a statement, of course.
The Killing
was a symptom of what society was. Here was a well-integrated young Asian man, who had a good job – but when hell broke loose, he got pointed at.”

Airing only a year after the Muhammed cartoons crisis, Rama was right on the zeitgeist – but
The Killing
always avoided forcing a point.

“Somebody spat at the teacher,” says Sveistrup. “But did that person do that because he was Asian, or because they suspected he killed the girl? I just wanted to raise the question.”

For Farshad Kholghi, the actor who played Rama, the part was ground-breaking because for once it portrayed an immigrant as an engaged member of society, rather than as a gang member. Before
The Killing
, Kholghi had been so frustrated at the lack of interesting Asian parts that he wrote about the problem in his weekly column for
Jyllands-Posten
. “I said: ‘Okay, I accept that you don’t want me to play Hamlet or a guy called Peter or John – but why can’t I play an ordinary guy named Hassan or Ali, who’s a dentist, who’s got a normal life, who’s not a criminal?’ I don’t know about England, but many Iranians in Denmark are either doctors or dentists. So why I can’t play the dull dentist?”

In
The Killing
, Rama was a teacher, not a dentist, but for
Kholghi he was still refreshingly normal. “It was a very cool role.”

But Rama wasn’t the only radical thing about
The Killing
. In fact, in production terms, the show marked a sea-change in the way that Danish television shows were made. Fifteen years ago, they simply weren’t very ambitious.

“It was pretty average,” says Piv Bernth, sitting in the show’s studios just west of Copenhagen. “It was good for the local region but we never really made it internationally. We did a lot of plays – stage plays adapted for TV. They were very simple. They didn’t have the filmic look. They were often filmed with just three cameras, which made the lights pretty boring because you had to be able to shoot from all angles.” Then, in the mid-90s, Dogme happened. Championed by the likes of Lars von Trier and Thomas Winterberg, Dogme was the school of Danish cinema that focussed on narrative and pared-down aesthetics, rather
than special effects. The films that were made according to Dogme’s rules won widespread acclaim. Suddenly, the eyes of the film world were on Denmark.

Danish television producers were inspired – not necessarily by Dogme’s specific values, but by the way Dogme had made it on the world stage. Dogme showed that Denmark, small as it was, could be a cultural force.

“We started to look at ourselves as less local and more international,” says Bernth. “We became more curious and ambitious. We started travelling to the US and asking: ‘Well, how do they do it?’ They were so excellent, and are still so excellent, at long-running TV series. And we weren’t, because we were quite new.”

Bernth and her colleague Sven Clausen were at the forefront of the transition. They visited the sets of shows like
LA Law
,
NYPD Blue
and
The West Wing
, and learned about how script-writing worked for multi-episode dramas. “They had this machine going, and the ‘writers’ room’ which was quite new to us.”

The pair of them set about creating a Scandinavian version of what they had found in America. The first was Clausen’s
Taxa
– a 56-episode show about the travails of a taxi company that ran for three years from 1997. This was followed in 2002 by Bernth’s family drama
Nikolaj og Julie
. Both were radical for their time – but they didn’t make waves outside Denmark. They were, however, the two shows on which Søren Sveistrup cut his teeth – and by the end of
Nikolaj og Julie
his reputation was so great that DR
invited him to create a 20-episode crime series, based on a concept of his choosing. DR expected him to come up with something a bit like
CSI
– a show that sees a new murder solved every episode.

But Sveistrup wanted to do something a bit more ambitious – something with narrative arcs that spread over several episodes, like
Twin Peaks
, or
24
.

“I came up with the idea that the story all comes from one murder,” he says. “At first, people said it couldn’t be done. They said we couldn’t do a story like this in 20 episodes, because people would get bored after one episode if they didn’t know who the killer was.”

But Sveistrup stuck to his guns, and
The Killing
was born. From the very beginning, he went about the project with the same newfound confidence that you can see in the work of other youngish Danes like Rene Redzepi, Bjarke Ingels and Claus Meyer.

“It was my ambition from the very start to do the world’s best show,” says Sveistrup, not in a haughty way. Tall, pale, and softly-spoken, he communicates with a quiet authority that never approaches arrogance. “People laughed at me. They said, ‘Oh, we can’t do that, we’re only Danish.’ Which is typically Danish. We’re not boasting types. But I wanted to do something exceptional. I was fed up with people saying that television is just television. We all watch feature films on our television screens – and the same stuff that you tell in those feature films, you could also tell in a television show.”

He achieved this not just through
The Killing
’s structure, but in the way it was shot. “Typical television is just close-ups. There would be a close-up with you and then a close-up with me. Talking heads. But I wanted to make it more epic – visually more epic. Larger pictures. Spaghetti western stuff. We often talked about westerns, actually. I’ve seen Clint Eastwood’s films many times. One man would arrive on a train. Another man would just look at him, and between them they’d create a moment. I still use that example to remind me not to get too busy with dialogue. Remember the pictures. Always the pictures. And the characters. Sarah Lund is the silent type. She didn’t need to say much. I hated detectives when they talked about their private lives. Clint Eastwood is the mysterious type. He doesn’t talk much. He’s silent – and because he’s silent, we have to imagine all kinds of stuff going on in his mind.”

He may have had his doubters, but Sveistrup had the last laugh. It’s subjective, of course, but
The Killing
is considered one of the world’s best television shows since
The Wire
. Bernth says it paved the way for later Scandi series like
The Bridge
, which wasn’t made by DR, but follows a similar structure to
The Killing
, and features an introverted female lead who draws comparisons to Sarah Lund.

“Everybody said we were crazy,” says Bernth. “They said we weren’t going to get the audience, because people wouldn’t want to sit there every Sunday and wait for 20 weeks to get the killer. But they did. It became an obsession. And I think
The Bridge
was very much inspired by that.”

The Killing
also broke ground simply through the size of its cast across the three seasons. The Danish acting community isn’t especially large – and you constantly see the same actors in different shows. On the wall of a room at
The Killing
studios, there’s a photo of Peter Mygind and Sofie Gråbøl. The photo is a still from
Nicolai og Julie
, in which the two actors starred. Tellingly, both of them would go on to play lead roles in, respectively,
Borgen
and
The Killing
. Søren Malling has big roles in both
The Killing
and
Borgen
, as do Bjarne Henriksen and Mikael Birkkjaer. Meanwhile, Kim Bodnia, who plays Martin Rohde in
The Bridge
, also has a part in
The Killing
. This list of crossovers goes on and on – and it prompted the
Guardian
to run a Venn diagram of
them all under a headline that asked: “Has Denmark run out of actors?”