Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 10 June

Occupied (2016-2019)

Occupied was one of the first series we really binged. Season One came out in New Zealand on DVD/Blu-ray from Madman and we thor­oughly enjoyed the “what if” con­ceit of the thing:

The show teeters between pre­pos­ter­ous and plaus­ible but by the second half of the sea­son we were watch­ing three epis­odes a night so it would be fair to say we were gripped and the final epis­ode ended so abruptly that my wife and I star­ted search­ing the box for miss­ing discs.

That quote comes from my 2016 RNZ review of the first sea­son, as does this intro­duc­tion to the premise:

The Greens have won power in Norway and Prime Minister Jesper Berg (Henrik Mestad) is mak­ing good on his party’s prom­ise to con­vert their energy eco­nomy from car­bon to clean (nuc­le­ar) Thorium and then make that tech­no­logy avail­able to any­one who wants it. The European Union decides that a uni­lat­er­al turn­ing off of the gas tap is too great a risk to their mem­ber states but that dir­ect inter­ven­tion would be a bad look.

However Russia, Norway’s almost-totalitarian neigh­bour to the North-east, isn’t very con­cerned about look­ing bad and is able to apply con­sid­er­able pres­sure to the naïve politi­cian – firstly in the form of simple kid­nap­ping and then thug­gery, threats and – in the form of ambas­sad­or Sidorova (Ingeborga Dapkunaite) – a little bit of charm.

There’s a les­son here for the United Kingdom post-Brexit. If you’re not at the table you can nev­er really know for sure what people are say­ing about you and that’s a prob­lem when the table is say­ing, in effect, we need a régime change.

Seasons Two and Three were rushed into pro­duc­tion for Netflix1 and it showed. We were still highly enter­tained, as my review of the second sea­son indicates:

As we recon­vene, former-PM Jesper Berg (Henrik Mestad) has been ous­ted and is in exile in Sweden. His former chief-of-staff Anita Rygh (Janne Heltberg) com­bines con­jugal vis­its with attempts to keep him in con­tact with Norwegian polit­ic­al real­it­ies but their romantic entan­gle­ment seems doomed. Conflicted res­taur­at­eur Bente Norum (Ane Dahl Torp) now owns a hotel pat­ron­ised by olig­archs and is in love with the head of Russian secur­ity. Former prime-ministerial body­guard Hans Martin Djupvik (Eldar Skar) is now head of state secur­ity but seems to owe secret favours to every­body – includ­ing the majest­ic Russian ambas­sad­or Sidorova (Ingeborga Dapkunaite) who is play­ing every­one off against each other.

The viol­ent res­ist­ance is organ­ised via chat ses­sions inside an online first-person-shooter (set in a recog­nis­ably Nordic envir­on­ment). The actu­al mil­it­ary is frus­trated that they can’t join the fight and many Norwegian cit­izens are guiltily enjoy­ing the roubles the Russians bring and turn­ing a blind-eye to the Greenhouse Effect.

This sea­son of Occupied is even big­ger than the first – a co-production with French, Belgian and Danish tele­vi­sion as well as the inter­na­tion­al might of Netflix. It’s gor­geous to look at – Oslo’s mod­ern archi­tec­ture is strik­ingly pho­to­gen­ic through­out – although you can tell the pro­du­cers have some­times struggled to main­tain snow continuity.

Season Three was released in 2019 but Netflix decided to keep it some kind of secret:

So, why didn’t Netflix alert me of its existence?

Perhaps because it isn’t as good as the first two sea­sons? Although qual­ity or embar­rass­ment doesn’t appear to get in the way of many Netflix recom­mend­a­tions. It’s a shame that sea­son three isn’t as good as One (Two wasn’t as good as One either but still pretty grip­ping). The premise is fant­ast­ic and the char­ac­ter­isa­tions – espe­cially the con­flic­ted envir­on­ment­al­ist politi­cian Jesper Berg (Henrik Mestad) – are mostly top notch.

But in this six-episode sea­son, motiv­a­tions are increas­ingly incon­ceiv­able and the sheer over-plottedness swamps any decent psy­cho­lo­gic­al insight. What star­ted out as sev­er­al strands of a soci­ety under extreme stress, now feels the need to wrap those strands up togeth­er as if they are all part of the same giant plot.

It’s still a tre­mend­ous watch and gave us a desire to vis­it Norway that remains unabated. As men­tioned above, the archi­tec­ture in par­tic­u­lar is spectacular.

I recently read about a Taiwanese show that is sim­il­arly spec­u­lat­ive – Zero Day is about a pos­sible Chinese inva­sion of Taiwan. Only one epis­ode has dropped, so far, and not on any of the loc­al stream­ers, but I’m curi­ous to see how it fares.

Where to watch Occupied

Aotearoa, Australia, Canada, USA & UK: Streaming on Prime Video

Ireland: Not cur­rently avail­able online

India: Not cur­rently avail­able online