Immediately following the international success that The Killing became, Danmarks Radio, the Danish public service channel which is also one of the leading channels of the country, has enjoyed a considerable amount of acclaim for its new(er) TV series, Borgen (the short name for Christiansborg, the Danish parliament) of which the 3rd season is currently being aired in Denmark. It does what nice Sunday evening primetime TV does; it’s well acted and scripted, it’s familiar with a slight twist of exoticism and it raises contemporary issues of gender, family and politics in a pleasant, not-too-intrusive way (not in its storyline at least), all on top of a generous layer of page-turning fiction served up by a strong female character in the lead. Voila! There is little doubt that Borgen is a competently crafted series that even performs the occasional genius move now and then, carefully constructed to suit the mass audience of Danish viewers who paid for the series through their taxes. If there are water cooler topics in Denmark, Borgen is surely one of them.
Birgitte Nyborg spends the first two seasons on Borgen as the first female Prime Minister of Denmark and leader of the fictitious political party, The Moderates. At the outset she is married to a hunky, brainy man, has two school aged kids and a lovely home with a democratically appropriate amount of Scandinavian design items. As the tedious job consumes her more and more it all begins to crumble; her husband divorces her, her daughter suffers significantly under her absence from the home, she loses what should have been her reelection, in short: life is tough going when you have to parent, govern a country and discover that a happy family life doesn't necessarily fit in two full-on-careers at the same time (or was it the other way around), but most of all it seems to be saying, when you're a woman. In the beginning of season 3, two years have passed since last and Birgitte is trying to make a comeback in politics after having pursued her career in a private corporation abroad for a while.
Borgen presents itself as a political drama, but the political plot often reads predictably as a recapitulated Stratego match ("we have to give them this so that they will give us that") that looks to occasionally be needed merely to legitimize it as a political drama, a tendency that is strengthened throughout the 3rd season. For Birgitte is through-and-through an idealist and although some corners just aren't made for cutting, as she's told over and over by her colleagues, she wants to do it all, implicitly understood in the morally correct ways, that is. When, for instance, she is served a juicy piece of dirt on a silver platter and has the choice to take out a political opponent whose methods against her have been repulsively low, we already know it won’t happen. Her incorruptible ideals become a blockade that hinders her from entering into personal conflict in the political drama, which we must then look to her personal life for.
This is the true predicament of the series: it thought it was going to be something else than it became. Three seasons in, Borgen seems to be on one hand actively engaging in a discourse that it on the other hand seems to want to dismantle, at least the ambitions become severely obscured as the seasons roll by. If Danmarks Radio wanted to actually make a true political drama for the masses, they would, according to the premises they themselves set up, have been better off casting a male Prime Minister, for with Birgitte comes the (apparently still) inevitable question without which this show could not legitimize itself as 'realistic' according to its creators: how can a woman run a country and a household with two kids successfully at the same time? The morale prescribed so far has been so counterintuitive: Venture out to do good, woman, work hard, take the risks and you shall... lose. Not much good on her personal level has resulted from Birgitte's journey into the orbit of masculine dominion so far, presenting the high ideals to belong more to the writers than the character. By virtue of this 'Borgen’ becomes merely a dramatic amplification of the familiar and dated story: It's a Man's World. Needless to say, a male protagonist wouldn't have given rise to the same need for elaboration on the private storyline - although the issue of how to balance family and work, which is indeed a very real and worthy one, is also relevant to men.
Can one make a political drama with a female lead that does not use the private sphere of the character to develop its most immediate and present conflicts? Yes. Could one make a political drama with a male lead that relies heavily on developing and resolving its most pressing conflicts in a private sphere? Of course. Perhaps public service television just isn't ready to do it yet.
