‘The last episode ever’ said the BBC4 announcer. That might be for the best. You can milk an idea for too long, but I don’t believe they did that with Borgen. Three seasons would seem about right for length, although when you work out that it’s only four weeks from start to finish when you get two episodes every Saturday, it does seem fairly brief.
As some reviewers have said; it’s unusual, but good, to have so many women in a television series. Women in big roles, at that. So not only do we have a female lead as the politician, but she gets herself a female spin doctor.
Perhaps Katrine let the side down by being a ‘useless’ mother at times, but on the other hand, we do need to see that people are normal, average, poor, at what they do. And it was nice to see how well Kasper took to fatherhood, considering his own childhood and how hard he finds it to commit to a woman.
I can’t say I thought much of Birgitte’s ‘bit on the side,’ as boyfriend Jeremy described himself in the Guardian. I didn’t particularly like him, and the English dialogue was too perfect. We know that actors can do foreign langauges well, because they have a script, but what works well for a political state visit, doesn’t really do for intimate chats between lovers. Besides, female viewers want to see more of Mikael Birkkjær.
Torben’s wife was an interesting character. And I don’t know what to call Torben’s boss. But it would be unprintable. Personally I found Søren Malling’s acting very good indeed. He really came into his own. For fictional characters, I very much liked Hanne.
The recycling of actors in a small country leads to weird situations, like when The Killing’s Troels came face to face with his PA. And for child actors, how can you possibly predict that one will grow tremendously over the years of filming, and the other one will hardly change at all?
Birgitte’s ‘cheaper’ flat seemed anything but. It was very trendy. Even the broom cupboard conference room at party headquarters had a certain charm.
Finally, isn’t it good that politicians can come up against laws they have put into existence, so that it’s ‘impossible’ to question them?
(Finally finally, how many people have stopped eating Danish pork?)
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