Eilif Skodvin, with Anne Bjørnstad, writes premises you can explain in one sentence, and the sentence is usually the best thing about the series. Lilyhammer is the proof: a good joke, told for three series, that needed a second one.
Fi1m perspective
A New York mobster gives evidence against his boss and, asked where he would like to be hidden, says Lillehammer, because he liked it during the 1994 Winter Olympics. That is the opening of Lilyhammer (2012), and it is the kind of thing Eilif Skodvin does: an idea small enough to say in one breath and odd enough to make you want the next episode. He and Anne Bjørnstad, his writing partner, created the series and wrote it with Steven Van Zandt, who plays the mobster. The premise is good. The question with Skodvin is what happens once the premise has been set up, and on the evidence we have the answer is not enough.
He came up through Norwegian television comedy and satire, writing for Mandagsklubben from 1997 and later Rikets røst at Cosmo TV, a company he co-ran until it was sold to Rubicon in 2007; he became Rubicon's head of development the following year. Lilyhammer was his and Bjørnstad's first drama, and the comedy writer's habits are everywhere in it. They have kept the pattern since: Roeng (2018), on which Skodvin also produced and directed episodes; Beforeigners (2019–2022), in which people from other centuries arrive in present-day Oslo and have to be housed and found work; and Billionaire Island (2024), six episodes. Each has a crime or a procedural shape on top and something underneath about how Norway treats people who do not fit it.
The pleasure in Lilyhammer is Frank against the Norwegian way of doing things. Skodvin and Bjørnstad said they found it exciting "å få Frank til å bryne seg på det norske sosialdemokratiet", to set Frank against Norwegian social democracy, and for a few episodes it is. We liked Van Zandt's gentle, odd Frank more than we expected to, and we were still smiling at the end of the first hour; by the fourth episode we were counting how many were left, because the joke had not changed and nothing had arrived to sit beside it. Three series of eight episodes is a long time for one joke, and the series stays pleasant and thin all the way through. We have not reviewed Beforeigners, whose premise is the best he has had, but reviews at home noticed clunky lines and uneven scenes, which sounds like the same complaint about a different series.
Skodvin has ideas, which is rarer in television than it ought to be, and he has a partner and a production company that let him make them. What he has not yet shown us is an idea for episode five as good as the idea for episode one. If the next series has one, we will watch it to the end, which with Lilyhammer we did more out of habit than appetite.
Biography
Eilif Skodvin is a Norwegian television writer and creator. With Anne Bjørnstad he created and wrote the series Lilyhammer (2012–2014).
Skodvin began his career writing for Norwegian comedy and satire programmes including Mandagsklubben (1999–2004) and Rikets røst (2005–2007). He and Bjørnstad later created Beforeigners (2019–2022) and Billionaire Island (2024).
