My name is Eva Novrup Redvall and I'm from the University of Copenhagen where I have done a major research project on the writing and products of Danish television drama series like Borgen and Forbrydelsen, The Killing from the Danish Broadcasting Corporation DR. This three-part lecture builds on material from the research project, and intends to give an overview of the major developments in Scandinavian television drama after 2000. The first part of the lecture deals with general developments in terms of producing television drama in the Scandinavian countries, as well as main trends and genres. The second part of the lecture focuses on the case of Danish television drama, which has gone through remarkable changes in this period of time and is currently enjoying wide spread international success. Finally, the last part of the lecture focuses specifically on Scandinavian crime series, which are now often discussed as a special kind of Scandicrime, or Nordic Noir. Since these have emerged as a particularly successful Scandinavian brand of scripted television drama since the 2000s. In the past years in Scandinavia as in most other countries, the landscape of television has been marked by major technological change and still more competition in the media landscape. For many years communication satellites have challenged the traditional border and barriers for national television. But today numerous international online platforms are also offering a wide variety of product to international audiences. The past years have been marked by still more competition. And whereas public service broadcasters previously did not have to worry too much about the size of the national audiences this has gradually changed so that the expensive drama production now has to justify its existence by proving it's worth to a different extent. This has led to numerous changes in the approaches to making Scandinavian television drama. But it is important to note that the majority of Scandinavian productions are still made by or for publicly funded broadcasters with a public service mandate. These broadcasters are supposed to serve the people and to assume a number of societal and cultural obligations. Once such obligation is to offer what the market driven players are not offering. Another is to ensure the existence of drama productions in the native languages. While this focus on productions in the Scandinavian languages has traditionally been regarded as a barrier for reaching foreign audiences, one of the remarkable developments in the 2010s has been the sudden interest in foreign fare and subtitled content, by particularly British audiences. With BBC4 scheduling series like the Swedish Wallander bestseller adaptations followed by the thriller series The Killing, the political drama Borgen and the crime series The Bridge, certain UK audiences suddenly gained an interest in this kind of exotic programming. The press coverage during the UK airing of The Killing, seemed unprecedented for a subtitled series. With articles discussing how the portrayal of a modern welfare society mirrored the state of affairs in Britain, or gender issues related to the portrait of the series detective, Sarah Lund. On a less serious scale, there were attempts at doing semiotic analysis of Lund's iconic jumper. And encouragements to readers to send pictures of their similar knitting designs. Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall announced that she was an addict of the show, and when visiting Denmark in the spring of 2002, she got a special tour of the set and a copy of the jumper as a souvenir. With new platforms offering new ways of distributing content, and with what appears to be a new interest in subtitled series among certain audience demographics in the UK, these are sometimes referred to as the chattering classes, some believe this to be a time of a great opportunity for small nation production cultures. Whether this interest in what has been described as counterflows in the current television market will change the rules of the game remains to be seen. But from the Scandinavian perspective, it does seem to be a time of great interest in the local fare, bringing new money and new co-producing partners to the table. In terms of the series produced, the Scandinavian broadcasters have had quite different strategies for producing television drama in the 2000s. In Norway and Denmark, public service production has primarily been an in-house matter of production units within NRK and DR, while the Swedish productions for the public service broadcaster SVT have been marked by coming from external production companies. Parallel to the public service production, commercial players have increasingly moved into the production of television drama in a variety of genres. In Denmark since the production of the series Taxa in 1997, the strategy of the in-house production unit at DR has been to focus almost exclusively on long-running family or crime series at the expense of most other genres or formats. The series have been targeted at mainstream audiences for Sunday nights at eight while there has been no production of comedy or everyday drama for the mother channel DR1. The more niche channel DR2 has pioneered a variety of satirical formats. And other broadcasters have ventured into different comedy formats such as TV2's Klovn, Clown, often described as a Danish take on Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm. Or the series Rita, about a teacher with a lot of issues both inside and outside the classroom. In the past few years following the establishment of the so-called public service scheme which funds productions from other broadcasters than DR, TV2 has focused still more on also producing competing drama fare since the drama series by DR have continuously proven to be the most popular content with national audiences. However, all of the competing Danish productions have been marked by a focus on long running drama series of ten episodes, while, for instance, the miniseries have almost disappeared. As a contrast, the Norwegian and Swedish output has been marked by a variety of genres when one looks at the productions of the past years. SVT has produced many different kinds of miniseries, from explorations of the current state of the Swedish society in Det Nya Landet, The New Country, or the crime drama Lasermannen, The Laser Man, on a real life murder in the 1990s, to historical series on famous Swedes such as August Strindberg. The Swedish production of long running series has not found the same success as the Danish equivalents. But SVT has lately broken new ground and found international acclaim with the series Äkta Manniskor, Real Humans. The science fiction drama series challenges the dominating realist tradition of most Scandinavian television drama by pioneering a story of an alternate vision of modern day Sweden with a widespread use of humanoid robot workers and servants. While the strategy of Danish public service broadcaster DR has been to focus on original material for TV, several series from Norway and Sweden have been based on literary classics as well as best sellers. As an example, the best seller Kronprinsessen, The Crown Princess, by Danish author Hanne-Vibeke Holst, became a Swedish mini-series. In Norway, the books of Jan Kjerstad were recently adapted as a series, Erobreren, The Conqueror. While there has been a steady production of many kinds of dramatic material, there has also been room for experimenting with different comedy formats. One of the Norwegian hits of the past years is thus a comedy series Dag, about a marriage counselor with no trust in neither relationships nor the human kind as such. Lilyhammer is another recent Norwegian series, which has found audiences outside the national borders. From the story of a New York gangster played by Steven Van Zandt, who tries to start a new life in the small, post Winter Olympics town of Lillehammer. The series was bought by Netflix and launched as one of their original series, marking a whole new way for Nordic series to travel. Whereas the local drama production is normally popular with domestic audiences, few series have managed to attract substantial audiences outside the national borders until the past few years. Looking at the distribution of Nordic series since 2000, Danish series have fared fairly well in both Norway and Sweden while Danish audiences have taken less interest in series from the neighboring Scandinavian countries. Norwegian and Swedish audiences are better at watching each other's productions. The German market has taken an interest in the Scandinavian crime series for a number of years, but it is the certain British enthusiasm for series like The Killing and Borgen from DR which has created a new hype around Scandinavian television drama. The next part of this lecture focuses on the production strategies of DR, which changed remarkably in the 2000's, and are now considered an example of best practice among many players in the European television industry.
