Adapt or die. That mantra of Darwinian evolution — and an increasingly active environmental movement — takes on poignant and urgent new meaning in the stirring, often unforgettable political drama Borgen: Power & Glory, from playwright and former head-of-drama for the Danish broadcaster TV2, Adam Price.
The original Borgen, which premiered on the Danish public broadcaster DR1 in the autumn of 2010, ran for three seasons and won the 2013 Peabody Award, unheard-of for a foreign-language drama with English subtitles, especially a drama that focused on an issue as potentially offputting to a mainstream television audience as party politics in a small European middle power. The original Borgen told how, against all the odds, Birgitte Nyborg, a moderate, left-leaning politician, is appointed the first female prime minister of Denmark after an election ends in gridlock between previously dominant political parties of conservatives, socialists, liberals and far-right nut jobs. Nyborg, consummately played by Sidse Babett Knudsen — nominated in 2012 for the International Emmy Award for outstanding actress in a drama series — elects to govern according to her own principles, resulting in bitter back-room power plays between those who want to depose her and those who see her as a breath of fresh air in a world of politics grown old and stale.
So far, there’s nothing here to suggest that Borgen would be resurrected nearly 10 years later, and by Netflix of all places, as that increasing rarity: a compelling TV revival that — surprise — turns out to be just what the world needed: a relevant, topical, eight-hour drama so adult and so nuanced that it puts most other political dramas to shame.
It helps, of course, that Power & Glory creators Adam Price and Martin Lidegaard, a sitting MP in Denmark’s parliament and chairman of the government’s Foreign Policy Committee, came up with an idea that’s both topical and urgent: the climate crisis, and the way Big Oil uses its influence to hold world economies to ransom by exacerbating the already tense conflict between the fossil fuel industry and renewable energy.
Power & Glory opens in Greenland, a vast, relatively untrammeled Arctic land mass with a total population of 56,000 primarily indigenous First Nations people under the stewardship of Denmark, Europe’s 12th largest economy, with a population of six million. A Canadian oil company has just discovered a vast oil field which, if early signs are true, could rival the entire output of Norway’s gas and oil industry combined— basically, enough money to create no end of corruption, influence peddling and international chess playing. There’s just one catch: Nyborg, now Denmark’s chair of foreign policy and short-listed to become the country’s new minister of foreign affairs, is at heart still an ardent environmentalist. It’s only a matter of time — three hours in TV time — before she’s in conflict with her boss, the sitting prime minister, her own party, her coalition partners, and the small matter of not one but three world powers, Russia, China and the US, all of whom are eager to exploit Greenland’s resources to their own and not entirely compatible ends. Before you can say, a Shakespearean play for the 21st century, the tenuous bond that keeps power and peacemaking connected begins to fray at the edges.
There is so much in Borgen: Power & Glory to recommend it, from the gorgeous Arctic setting — Power & Glory was made on a Netflix budget, and it shows — to the uncanny way it shows the urgency of climate breakdown; to its eerily prescient take on current affairs in the real world (there’s even reference to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and upheaval in the oil markets, little more than 100 days after the actual war began); to the acting, including a tour-de-force turn by newcomer Mikkel Boe Følsgaard as a junior level diplomat confronted with an emotional crisis that almost breaks him — to, and this is the most profound and poignant of all, the way the clearest eyes and fullest hearts on the environment belong to the young people, Indigenous and Danish alike.
Borgen: Power & Glory is part passion play, part political thriller and wholly engaging, with big ideas about how “The future is female” (the title of the opening episode) doesn’t always result in sisterly solidarity, and how tempting it must be to cross over to the dark side if it means earning a just result in the end. Heavy is the head that wears the crown — all the more so when the very climate is at stake, together with the future of the planet. Borgen is brilliant.
— Netflix, streaming globally.
©Mike Kollöffel/Netflix