Coming late to ‘Borgen’

Borgen is a ‘Danish’ TV drama, a political drama which was first released in 2010. It was popular not just in Denmark but in many other countries too, and won many awards. For some reason which I have now forgotten, it didn’t appeal to me; I’ve not watched other political films and series, such as ‘House of Cards’, ‘The Thick of It’ or ‘The Honourable Woman’. I’m much more of a fan of crime and mystery series.

I’ve written quite a lot about ‘Forbrydelsen’,’The Killing’ and ‘Bron’/’Broen’, ‘The Bridge’ which are Danish crime series, which I really enjoyed and thought excellent from every point of view… it was this excellence and quality, which prompted me belatedly to get ‘Borgen’ as a box set. Even though I bought it a few months ago, I haven’t got round to watching it, until last night.

Well, it is excellent and I am utterly gripped! I was a little confused at first with the flurry of different characters, the leaders and representatives and officers of different political parties, but that all fell away as the first part unfolded. The story starts a few days before a general election… since it was a week ago tonight that the votes for in our extraordinary general election were being counted, it seemed very timely. I know very little about Danish politics, apart from what I gleaned from ‘Forbrydelsen’, where the crimes were investigated against a political sub-plot.

However, that didn’t really matter. There was everything you might expect from a really good drama, excellent acting, sharp script (OK it was in Danish but there were subtitles) pace, action, subtle music, tension, unexpected events… I’ve only watched episode 1, I’m about to watch the second,but I’m hooked! It’s stayed in my mind all day as I wonder what might happen next!

If you haven’t seen it yet, then even though I’ve only seen one episode of one series, I really recommend it!