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.
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Notes
Patrick Kingsley, How to Be Danish: From Lego to Lund. A Short Introduction to the State of Denmark (London: Short Books, 2012).
Eva N. Redvall, European TV Drama Series Lab: Summary of Module 1 (Berlin: Erich Pommer Institut, 2012).
John T. Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 3.
See Ib Bondebjerg and Eva N. Redvall, A Small Region in a Global North: Patterns in Scandinavian Film &r TV Culture (Copenhagen: Think Tank on European Film and Film Policy, 2011).
Muriel Cantor, The Hollywood Television Producer: His Work and His Audience (New York: Basic Books, 1971);
Horace Newcomb, “The Creation of Television Drama,” in A Handbook of Qualitative Methodologies for Mass Communication Research, eds Klaus Bruhn Jensen and Nicholas W. Jankowski (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 93–107;
Horace Newcomb and Richard S. Alley, The Producer’s Medium: Conversations with Creators of American TV (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
For discussions on quality television, see, for example, Mark Jancovich, Quality Popular Television (London: British Film Institute, 2003);
Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, Quality TV Contemporary American Television and Beyond (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007).
Jon Kraszewski, “Hybridity, History, and the Identity of the Television Studies Teacher,” Cinema Journal 50, no. 4 (2011): 168.
Cultural Human Resources Council, Showrunners: Film and Television: A Competency Analysis (Ottawa: CHRC, 2009), 4.
For example, Ellen Sandler, The TV Writer’s Workbook (New York: Delta Trade Paperbacks, 2007).
Pamela Douglas, Writing the TV Drama Series, 2nd ed. (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions, 2007), 255.
Robert Del Valle, The One-hour Drama Series: Producing Episodic Television (Los Angeles: Silmon-James Press, 2008), 403.
Denise Mann, “It’s Not TV, It’s Brand Management TV: The Collective Author(s) of the Lost Franchise,” in Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries, eds Vicki Mayer, Miranda J. Banks, and John T. Caldwell (New York: Routledge, 2009), 100.
Georgina Born, Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC (London: Vintage, 2005), 235–237.
Angus Finney, The State of European Cinema (London: Cassell, 1996).
The research was funded by The Danish Council for Independent Research I Humanities (FKK). This article builds on material from the book based on the research project by Eva N. Redvall, Writing and Producing Television Drama in Denmark: From The Kingdom to The Killing (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
Eva N. Redvall, “A Systems View of Filmmaking as a Creative Practice,” Northern Lights 10 (2012): 57–73.
Eva N. Redvall, “Scriptwriting as a Creative, Collaborative Learning Process of Problem Finding and Problem Solving,” MedieKultur 46 (2009): 34–55;
Redvall, “Teaching Screenwriting in a Time of Storytelling Blindness: The Meeting of the Auteur and the Screenwriting Tradition in Danish Film-making,” Journal of Screenwriting 1 (2010), 57–79.
For example, Mayer, Banks, and Caldwell, eds, Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries; Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren, eds, Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
Horace Newcomb and Amanda D. Lotz, “The Production of Media Fiction,” in A Handbook of Media and Communication Research, ed. Klaus Bruhn Jensen (London: Routledge, 2002), 62–77.
Horace Newcomb, ed., Television: The Critical View, 7th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
For example, in New Zealand as analyzed in Trisha Dunleavy, “New Zealand Television and the Struggle for ‘Public Service’,” Media, Culture and Society 30 (2008): 795–811;
Dunleavy, “New Zealand on Air, Public Service Television, and TV Drama,” in Reinventing Public Service Communication: European Broadcasters and Beyond, ed. Petros Iosifidis (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 298–310.
Clausen in Pernille Nordstrøm, Fra Riget til Bella (Copenhagen: DR Multimedie, 2004), 55.
For example, Mette Hjort, Eva Jørholt, and Eva N. Redvall, eds, Danish Directors 2: Dialogues on the New Danish Fiction Cinema (Bristol: Intellect Press, 2010).
See Patricia Phalen and Julia Osellame, “Writing Hollywood. Rooms with a Point of View,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 56 (2012): 3–20;
Felicia D. Henderson, “The Culture behind Closed Doors: Issues of Gender and Race in the Writers’ Room,” Cinema Journal 50, no. 2 (2010): 145–152.
Vera John-Steiner, Creative Collaboration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
For example, Eva N. Redvall, European TV Drama Series Lab: Summary of Module 2 (Berlin: Erich Pommer Institut, 2013).
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© 2013 Petr Szczepanik and Patrick Vonderau
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Redvall, E.N. (2013). A European Take on the Showrunner? Danish Television Drama Production. In: Szczepanik, P., Vonderau, P. (eds) Behind the Screen. Global Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137282187_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137282187_10
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