“People like us don’t lead normal lives. We come home too late, get up too early and disappoint too many of those we love.” So speaks Brigitte Nyborg, 53, now Denmark’s foreign minister and in the midst of a crisis that there is always in her life.
“Wouldn’t you rather choose someone who works hard than someone who picks up their children at four?” she asks her counterpart, a young man with the beautiful name Ager Holm Kierkegaard, who is her most important confidant in order to get out of this one to get out of the crisis. “Yes,” he says, “but it’s sad.” Nyborg pours herself another glass of white wine and a pleading smile spreads across her face, then she throws up her arms and says: “But that’s how we are! “
What politicians are like, how they conduct politics and, above all, what politics in turn does to them was shown in the Danish TV series “Borgen” more precisely and mercilessly than any series before it. The story of Brigitte Nyborg, played by Sidse Babett Knudsen, her rise to become Denmark’s first female prime minister (even before the social democrat Helle Thorning-Schmidt became it in real life), her decline and eventual resurgence has been hailed as “Danish TV Miracle”. Despite numerous imitation attempts, even with large budgets and even bigger names, nothing comparable was ever achieved.
And actually she seemed to have been told; It’s been nine years since Nyborg was last seen: happy, having won the election, at peace with himself and politics and otherwise on Arte. In the meantime, however, the series has migrated to Netflix, and there they currently prefer to focus on the learned and proven, see also “Bridgerton” and “Stranger Things” – so why not continue the mother of all political series? After all, real politics continues.
The new “Borgen” series is eerily closely based on the current world situation: The focus is on an oil discovery in Greenland. Nyborg, whose party is committed to climate protection, would like to moderate the issue, but has to admit: “The Greenlanders don’t care about the climate and the environment.” On the contrary, in Nuuk they dream of becoming an arctic Abu Dhabi and dealing with the oil – Freeing millions from the Danish drip. To make matters worse, a Russian is involved in the drilling, a suspected henchman of Putin, who has just invaded Ukraine – on the other hand, Denmark would like to be independent of Russian energy for this very reason and could use the oil well. Nyborg is therefore in its natural habitat – between all fronts.
This is how a grandiose one unfolds nordic noir, who constantly and confidently switches back and forth between Greenlandic ice and the Danish backrooms of power. “Power has a life of its own. Suddenly you abandon everything you believed in,” Nyborg once said. And she means it!
Borrow. Power and Glory, Series, 8 Episodes, Netflix