Borgen

Borgen is the nickname for Christiansborg, the palace in Copenhagen where the Danish parliament sits, and the series Adam Price and Camilla Hammerich created treats it as an office block that happens to contain a throne room. Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen) leads a small centre party. In the first episode the sitting prime minister, Lars Hesselboe (Søren Spanning), makes a mistake in the last week of the campaign, and Nyborg finds herself able to form a government. She takes the job. The thirty episodes that follow, across three seasons between 2010 and 2013, are about what it costs her, and most of them are as good as the reviews said.

The shape is weekly. Each hour hands Nyborg a problem: a minister who has said the wrong thing, a bill one vote short, a favour owed to Svend Åge Saltum (Ole Thestrup), the leader of the populist right, who plays the plain farmer and is cleverer than his opponents give him credit for. Bent Sejrø (Lars Knutzon), her mentor, sits at the end of the table and tells her what she would rather not hear. By the end of the hour she has found a way through, and it is nearly always a compromise she would have refused at the start. The writers, Price, Jeppe Gjervig Gram, Tobias Lindholm and others, make her sound right when she gives ground and right when she does not.

The other half is television. Katrine Fønsmark (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen) reads the news at TV1 under an editor, Torben Friis (Søren Malling), who wants the story tonight, and beside Hanne Holm (Benedikte Hansen), a veteran reporter. Malling is the quietest asset here. He never raises his voice, and he makes the newsroom feel like the building where the real power sits. The editors, a long roster of them, cut between palace and studio so that a decision taken in one becomes a headline in the other before the scene is over.

Nine directors share the work, Charlotte Sieling, Søren Kragh-Jacobsen and Jesper W. Nielsen among them, and the look holds across all of them. Søren Gam and Dorte Knirke Madelung give Nyborg an office of pale wood and long tables, and TV1 a glass box in which everyone can watch everyone else fail. The light is Danish winter light, grey and low, and half the important conversations happen in the back of a car at night. Halfdan E’s theme is a short, cold piano figure over a pulse, and the episodes themselves run almost without music, which is the right decision for a series about people talking.

Knudsen holds it together. She plays Nyborg as competent, warm and capable of surprising herself, and the moment in the first episode when she puts down her notes at the televised debate and simply talks moved us more than we were ready for. It was not the speech. It was her face afterwards, as if she had done something she could not take back, and the cut to Philip Christensen (Mikael Birkkjær), her husband, watching at home with their son Magnus (Emil Poulsen), knowing what it would mean for the three of them. Philip has agreed to put his own career second. We will not say how that goes.

The flaw is tidiness. Problems arrive on Monday and are solved by Friday, and the right answer is usually visible; the only question is whether Nyborg can afford it. The opposition, Saltum aside, is a set of positions rather than people. The home scenes are written with the same neatness, and it suits them less, because a marriage does not resolve on a weekly schedule and once or twice the series behaves as though it might. The third season opens with a change we will not describe, brings in Lars Mikkelsen as Søren Ravn, an economist, and takes a few episodes to settle.

The comparison everyone reaches for is The West Wing, and it holds as far as it goes: both series love competent people and want us to love them too. Borgen is colder, and its politics is coalition politics, where nobody wins outright and every victory is on loan. Watch two episodes a night and not more. The problems are meant to be sat with, and the subtitles are quick.