How Netflix Transformed Scandinavian Television

A dozen years ago, Netflix kicked off a global media revolution in a Norwegian ski resort.

Lily Hammer a fish out of water series set in Lillehammer, Norway with ex-Soprano star Steven Van Zandt as a mobster under witness protection was the streamer's first foray into the original series business. A year later came a little show called House of CardsAnd the rest is history.

Since then, the Scandinavian TV industry has experienced a streaming boom and a major bust. HBO Max, which has invested heavily in Nordic originals, including the ambitious sci-fi satire The precedents from Lily Hammer creators Anne Bjørnstad and Eilif Skodvin — pulled out of the region in 2022, in the wake of the merger that created Warner Bros. Discovery, saying it would no longer produce Nordic originals. Local streaming giant Viaplay has been betting big on Scandinavian dramas in the decade since Netflix arrived, but faced with huge losses, it cut its original content budget last year from around 50 titles a year to 10 and shifted to more cost-conscious nonfiction programming and cheaper licensing from the U.S.

Netflix has never stopped betting on the Nordic countries.

With shows like the Danish post-apocalyptic YA drama RainSwedish crime series Snabba Cashand Norwegian monster movies TrollThe streamer has invested its money in ambitious projects that are hardly visible on Scandinavian TV.

“Back then, a country like Norway would do maybe 2-3 shows a year,” he recalls. Lily Hammer co-creator Skodvin. “You had the big shows on the state channel and then maybe a couple of comedies on the commercial networks. With Netflix came the streaming revolution and everything changed. Suddenly we were able to tell our stories to the whole world.”

Fast forward 12 years and the company has invested “hundreds of millions of euros” in original programming in the region, according to Jenny Stjernströmer-Björk, Netflix’s vice president of Nordic content, “and we will continue to do so.”

With the region’s other streaming services retiring or scaling back, this level of investment is critical to the region’s industry.

“Drama producers [in Scandinavia] have had a tough time recently, especially with Viaplay’s investment in drama collapsing,” Bjørnstad says. “So Netflix’s role is really important now. It’s crucial that they continue to invest in all the talent that has come out of the boom.”

On September 12, Bjørnstad and Skodvin launched their new Netflix show, Billionaires' IslandA SuccessionCartoon-style satire of the ultra-rich, with a very Norwegian twist.

“These are these salmon fishing families who have become part of the 1 percent, the richest people in the world,” Bjørnstad says, “they’re all on this little island far out at sea. In about 20 years, six of the island’s 5,000 inhabitants have become billionaires.”

“It's an American-style soap opera about the super-rich, like Dallas OR Dynastybut with salmon fishing,” adds Skodvin.

Billionaires' Island It was a hit across Scandinavia, reaching #1 on Netflix in Norway and the top 5 in Sweden and Denmark.

Pan-Nordic success stories like this are rarer than you might think. And they’re not Netflix’s primary goal. When commissioning a new Nordic original, the goal, Stjernströmer-Björk says, is to be as local as possible.

“With our Danish projects, we focus on our Danish members, when we commission a Swedish project, it’s all about our Swedish members and so on,” he says. “We’re quite small countries and from the outside we can look very similar: we understand our languages, we share a lot of history but we’re also quite different.”

“When I started working with Netflix, I expected to get all kinds of notes, like, ‘Change this so it can work for our Belgian audience or our African audience,’ but I never got that note,” says Kasper Barfoed, a Danish medical drama writer/director. The Nurse and serial killer thriller The Chestnut Man for Netflix. “Instead it's always: 'Make it as Danish as possible, put all those little weird things in there.' I understand that their experience is that if it works locally, a series has the best chance of moving [borders]But if you try to make it work everywhere, it won't work anywhere.”

Respecting local creative visions, however, has not meant lowering professional standards. Scandinavian producers credit the streaming giant with professionalizing the Nordic industry and bringing it up to date.

“We take things like intimacy coordinators, which were a completely new thing before Netflix,” Barfoed says. “It was the first time I’d worked with an intimacy coordinator, and it was incredible, amazing. They’re pushing us to become more professional, to become better.”

“Before Netflix there wasn't really a professional industry here, not in that sense,” Skodvin says. “When we make Lily HammerWe had no idea what we were doing, no idea of ​​budget, nothing. Now when you do a show in Scandinavia, you have professionals in every department, people know what they're doing.”

After a dozen years in the Nordics, it looks like Netflix is ​​here to stay. The streamer’s new Scandi series, which will be unveiled Thursday at the grand opening of Netflix’s new Nordic hub in Stockholm, Stjernströmer-Björk says, “is our biggest, boldest and most ambitious to date.” In addition to fiction, the streamer has doubled down on local reality and documentary formats: Love is blind in Sweden; the non-fiction film A beautiful REAL life on Danish song star Christopher; the Sundance-winning documentary Ibeline about Norwegian gamer Mats Steen.

However, after enduring an unprecedented boom, followed by a devastating crisis, producers in the region remain cautious about the future.

“Netflix is ​​here and they’re commissioning shows, they’re developing shows, and that’s good, but the ground is shifting beneath our feet,” Barfoed says. “What are we going to look like in five years, 10 years? Are the other players coming in, Amazon, Apple? Right now, it’s the traditional broadcast networks and Netflix. Is that sustainable? I don’t know.”