This week I am off on my first Business Trip (oo doesn't that make me feel important! lol). I am being sent to Switzerland for some product training, so its time to dust off the old grey cells and try really hard not to do anything embarrassing in front of the important people. I am looking forward to the chance to stop feeling quite so lost in my job, and also to explore a new place. This also means I have to fly on my own for the first time, so I have spent the whole night convincing myself I really like flying, flying is cool....
But I promised you a TV review, and the show I am going to review in Borgen (pronounced bow-un with a bit of the weird Germanic-style fleming in the middle), a Danish political drama. Joni and I were brought to watching this after really enjoying The Killing, a crime series made by the same people, last year. We rented Borgen from Lovefilm and found it so gripping we have watched all 10 hours in one week (tripling our usual weekly viewing figures!).
To give you brief synopsis, it starts with the election of a new Prime minister in Denmark, and the series follows their first year in office from both the governments point of view, and also through the eyes of the number 1 news station in Denmark, TV1. It is a show about family life, careers, journalism (particularly topical atm) and politics. But above all of that its a story about characters and that is why I loved it so much.
I don't know how they do it, but Scandinavian writers just seem to have some ability to make realistic characters that no one else does. We saw it with The Killing, and with The Royal Affair (a film still a possible contender for best film in 2012) and Borgen is full of it too. Just the right number of characters for you to remember who they all are, every one of them with depth and dimensions enough to make you feel they could really exist.
For course that makes the show a little slow and meandering, because real life is quite slow and meandering. No one screams and shouts, throws highly breakable objects across rooms or starts sleeping with their secretary within 24 hours of hiring them, because no one does that it real life either. And that is the pure brilliance of this show. It doesn't matter if you don't care about politics or news reporting or if you don't understand the Danish political system (although I do thing all AV-haters should be forced to watch this show so they can finally understand how it is a much better system) because this is a show about people. And I can't wait for the next series!
Well, that was a bit serious for me wasn't it? Back to normal now because I bought a Christmas tree and its too big for the room! Hahahahaha!!!
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