A European Take on the Showrunner? Danish Television Drama Production

Abstract

TV series produced by the Danish Broadcasting Corporation DR for Sunday evenings on the national screens have been remarkably successful in the past ten years. They have continuously had large domestic audiences and they have won four Emmy awards for best international drama since 2002. Since the 2010s, international audiences have also tuned in, despite the traditional fear of subtitled content and the local nature of the stories and settings. British audiences enjoyed crime series Forbrydelsen/The Killing (2007–2012) to the extent that the knitting pattern of the female detective Sarah Lund’s notorious sweater has circulated in newspapers, and books on how to be Danish “from Lego to Lund” have been published.’ Following The Killing, the series Borgen (2010–2013) about a female politician becoming the first prime minister of Denmark also found audiences in the UK, and in 2012 The Independent sent a reporter to Copenhagen on a mission to discover the secrets of “the Danish TV hit factory.”2 In the meantime, American audiences have watched an American remake of The Killing (2011–2013) on AMC, and a Borgen remake is in the works.