Writing and Producing Television Drama in Denmark

With large domestic audiences and four Emmy awards for best international drama since 2002, the high-profile drama series produced by the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) have had a remarkable success in the past ten years. In the 2010s, US and UK audiences as well as critics discovered Forbrydelsen/The Killing (2007–2012) and Borgen (2010–2013), despite the traditional fear of subtitled content and the local nature of the stories and settings. The Killing won the international BAFTA award in 2011, beating US productions like Mad Men (AMC 2007-) and Boardwalk Empire (HBO 2010-). This kind of audience appreciation and acclaim has led to an interest in whether there is a certain approach to making one-hour quality drama series at DR, suddenly being labelled by some journalists as ‘the Danish TV hit factory’ (Gilbert 2012).

Where do ideas for television series come from? How do writers, producers and broadcasters settle on the ideas to pursue and what are the stages and challenges in developing ideas into series for the screen? One would think that questions like these about the choices of practitioners and the nature of production were central to film and media studies, yet limited attention has been given to the creative process of developing and producing new works of fiction, let alone to the study of these in television.

In Denmark, as in many other countries, local scripted drama is among the most popular content on television. Since the late 1990s, new series from DR have continuously had impressive audiences on Sunday nights at 8 pm. Some reruns of older series also attract large audiences. In the autumn of 2012, the legendary family chronicle Matador (1978–1981), which was originally broadcast as four seasons, received its seventh rerun on Saturday nights at 8 pm with audience figures that forced the competing channel TV 2 to move their prestigious talent show to 9 pm. Even the national football team couldn’t compete, seeing the little over half a million viewers watching a game on 8 September beaten by more than a million viewers for the rerun of the first episode of Matador in spite of the fact that 3.6 million DVDs of the series had been sold by the spring of 2012 (Figure 2.1).1

There have been major changes in the approach to writing and producing television at DR since the mid 1990s. This chapter introduces how Lars von Trier’s Riget/The Kingdom (1994) was an important source of inspiration to people in the film and television industry and brought the two worlds closer together by marrying cinematic imagery with episodic storytelling and by showing that one could create productions that were eclectic and artistic as well as popular for the small screen. The hiring of two film directors as Heads of Drama in the mid 1990s further strengthened the meeting between film and television, and with the building of new studios and the creation of so-called ‘production hotels’ the spaces of production facilitated the making of long-running series as flagships for DR.

Almost all writers and the younger producers at DR are alumni from The National Film School of Denmark (NFSD). As two examples, all writers of The Killing and all the episode writers of Borgen have an educational background in the Screenwriting Department of the School. The vast majority of talent behind recent series thus come from the same educational institution with which DR has had a steady collaboration since the late 1990s. As part of the Screen Idea System perspective on writing and production, this chapter analyses the ideas of best practice being taught to the new talent at the Film School, and traces how teaching writing for television gradually became an established part of the curriculum during the 2000s. This partly happened due to new developments in the domain, where US quality series convinced people at the School that it was worthwhile to also take television seriously in an art school environment after years of focusing exclusively on film. However, central experts in the field from DR also played a major part in this development by encouraging collaboration, sharing their knowledge and taking an interest in the students to help ensure the emergence of strong television writers.

Television production is a complex process with input from many people along the way. The collaborative nature of the workflows is generally acknowledged as the nature of creating new series, and in television studies there has been remarkably less interest in singling out the individual contributions behind specific productions than among scholars focusing on the film medium, traditionally found to be the place for more individual, artistic expression. Within the extensive ‘how-to’-literature for film and television writing, the collaborative process is often addressed from the very outset of books on writing for the small screen. Whereas classic ‘how-to books’ for film often address the singular writer and rarely comment extensively on the mode of production as such, several books on writing for television start by emphasizing the collective nature of the process. In Writing the TV Drama Series, Pamela Douglas states that ‘if you go on to write for television, you’ll never work alone. Series are like families, and even though each episode is written by one writer, the process is collaborative at every step’ (2007, 11). Moreover, many screenwriting manuals for television address the industrial context, stressing how television writing is not only about being good at storytelling but also about the industrial rules of the game.

There is a limited tradition of working with writers’ rooms on high-profile drama series in the European television industry. European writers are sometimes described as going from ‘from shell to shell’ (Redvall 2012a, 17), whereas the US system is built around rooms of several writers developing material together under the supervision of a showrunner. Part of the explanation for the structural differences is the fundamental need to have several writers attached in the US system where vast amounts of material has to be produced in a short period of time, when pilots for new shows are normally ordered in January and delivered at the end of April or beginning of May after which shows for the summer or autumn are ordered. By June a writers’ room for a new show should be in place to start submitting storylines to the broadcaster and get notes. While there is no standardized season for pitching or production in most European contexts, US showrunner Frank Spotnitz has described the US system as moving ‘pretty fast and or derb’ (in Redvall 2012a, 30). At the European TV Drama Series Lab, Spotnitz addressed the challenges of establishing a writers’ room when moving to the UK to develop the series Hunted for the BBC (2012-). According to him, the process was marked by the meeting of two very different production cultures: At the level of management, executives wanted a US showrunner without really knowing what this might imply, and at the level of writers, there were challenges in the UK writers not being used to working in a writers’ room (in Redvall 2013, 12).

SØren Sveistrup’s crime thriller Forbrydelsen/The Killing (2007–2012) is the best-known example of a DR series, which has made it onto the international scene. The press coverage during the UK airing seemed unprecedented for a subtitled series with articles discussing how the portrayal of a modern welfare society mirrored the state of affairs in Britain, or gender issues related to the portrait of the series’ detective Sarah Lund. On a less serious scale, there were attempts at doing semiotic analysis of Lund’s iconic sweater and encouragement to readers to send pictures of their own similar knitting designs. Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, announced that she was an ‘addict’ of the show, and when visiting Denmark in the spring of 2012, she got a special tour of the set of The Killing III and a copy of the sweater as a souvenir.1 The series won the international BAFTA award in 2011, beating series like Mad Men (AMC 2007-) and Boardwalk Empire (HBO 2010), and it has been remade as The Killing (2011-) for the US cable channel AMC (Figure 7.1).2

This book has explored the approach to writing and producing television drama in one specific, national production culture by offering analyses of some of the many complexities related to creating new screen ideas. The book has offered insights into the mode of production at DR Fiction and into the creative work of practitioners working within this public service production unit. As pointed to in the different chapters, the mode of production of DR Fiction has changed dramatically since the 1990s, and the current success of series like Borgen (2010–2013) and The Killing (2007–2012) should be seen as linked not only to the talented people involved in the making of the series — ranging from writers, producers, directors, actors, production designers, directors of photography, composers and others — but also to the mandate or the managerial ideas of DR Fiction as well as to changes in the domain of television drama.