Want a medical drama, a spy thriller, a snowy neo-noir? Finland has you covered.
Americans who stream a lot of television are likely to have some familiarity with British or South Korean or Latin American TV. They may even have an idea of what to expect from a Turkish or Israeli or South African show.
It’s less likely that “Finnish TV” would conjure anything in their minds besides snow, or images of dour crime dramas from more celebrated TV-producing neighbors like Denmark and Sweden. But in a TV Venn diagram whose circles were tiny population, high productivity and “surprisingly enjoyable,” Finland would be in the center.
Don’t go looking for Finnish comedies — they may exist, but they don’t appear to be what the streaming services are buying. What you’re going to find are dramas, typically ones that bring a twist to familiar genres. They also tend to have an unforced seriousness, without the sanctimony or self-consciousness that often mar their American counterparts.
Here’s a look at some of the most recent Finnish shows to come to American screens, along with a slightly older one that has come closer than any other Finnish drama to really breaking through in the United States.
‘Piece of My Heart’
Premiering Thursday on the streaming service Topic (also home to “The Killing,” an icon of Scandinavian Noir), this eight-episode drama takes the conventions of the buddy-cop show and transfers them to an occupation not often featured on TV: child protective services.
Rita (Lotta Lehtikari) is the embittered veteran obsessed with a case that went wrong; Laura (Niina Koponen) is the idealistic, empathetic newcomer. They adjust to each other while going out on calls — yes, it’s a child-welfare procedural — involving Helsinki’s homeless, abused or simply troubled youngsters. Freaked-out parents and disingenuous bureaucrats are the antagonists; the police, the usual heroes in this sort of scenario, are a necessary evil, indifferent and sometimes hostile.
A few American shows, like “Judging Amy” and “The Guardian,” have ventured into this territory; “Piece of My Heart” may seem a little drab and slow by comparison, but it’s also more inclined to focus on the actual logistics of caring for children and less on the heart-tugging problems of the people providing the care, which is refreshing. (Rita and Laura have plenty of issues, including Rita’s continuing struggles with the case that hobbled her career, but the show doesn’t overly indulge them — the tone is “get over it and do your job.”)
An American viewer also may be grimly amused by the portrayal of social work in one of the world’s most advanced welfare states, such as when Laura takes a teenage girl shopping to buy furniture for her new duplex apartment, all provided by the government.
‘Replacements’
Released in 2015 but making its American debut last month on MHz Choice, “Replacements” is a hospital show whose weekly will-they-make-it? drama is, in true Finnish style, in the service of a season-long debate about medical ethics.
The central characters could have been lifted from “Grey’s Anatomy”: an arrogant and famous doctor and his gifted, self-righteous daughter, who works as a nurse while attending medical school and has a blood disease that’s typically fatal.
But there’s so much more. The daughter, Sofia (Elena Leeve), discovers that she’s been kept alive by a bit of not just unethical but also illegal experimentation carried out years before by her father, who is also a scientist involved in stem cell research.
Sofia is inclined to expose her father’s dirty deeds, but doing so would bring an end to the good work he does as well as threaten her own health. It’s an ingenious setup: While she dithers, tap dancing with investigators and berating dad every chance she gets, she is also drawn into the cutting-edge work he and his team are doing. The show, therefore, gets to have case-of-the-week episodes while exploring, in more detail than we’re used to, the science and ethics of cloning and gene therapy.
As the highhanded but crafty scientist, Taneli Makela steals the show, bringing a perfectly controlled blend of intellectual disdain and deadpan humor to lines like, “You don’t want us to throw a perfectly good fetus away, do you?”
‘Shadow Lines’
“The Americans” and the “Deutschland” series set a high bar in the category of well-written, sleekly produced Cold War period dramas. Finland’s contribution to the genre, “Shadow Lines,” whose second season premiered in December on Sundance Now, is not far off in storytelling and production value. And it is distinguished by a strain of existential earnestness: The Finnish agents’ contributions to world-shaking events are taking place just down the road from the Soviet Union.
Emmi Parviainen plays Helena, a college student with a murky past who joins a secret unit of the security services in 1955, when the United States and the Soviet Union are both deeply interested in the outcome of the next Finnish presidential election. The C.I.A. is determined to keep the left-leaning Urho Kekkonen (Janne Reinikainen) out of office, while the K.G.B. is working just as hard to get him in. (The real-life Kekkonen won — he served for 26 years — and he does in the show as well, setting up the second season’s story lines.)
Helena’s group, known as Fist, watches, infiltrates and tries to thwart the plans of both of its much larger and better equipped intelligence rivals, and the Finns’ resourcefulness and bravery make for satisfyingly tense entertainment in this well-above-average spy drama. The action is crisp, the violence is realistic, and the costume and set designers convincingly evoke the early days of the Cold War.
‘Bordertown’
The three seasons of this cop show, available on Netflix, have probably done more than anything else to draw attention to Finnish TV. The third premiered on Netflix in 2020, as the pandemic was setting in, and no announcement has been made, one way or the other, about a Season 4.
The main attraction of “Bordertown” is the sly performance of Ville Virtanen as Kari Sorjonen, a classic idiosyncratic but high-functioning detective in the Sherlock Holmes mode. His eyes dart and his limbs twitch as he scans a crime scene before muttering, almost defensively, an uncanny analysis of the “We’re looking for a short woman in a blue parka with a limp” variety. Most shows play this sort of thing for humor, but in “Bordertown” it’s done straight — Kari is just that good.
“Bordertown” may be the best current exemplar of Scandinavian noir, and it doesn’t depart in any significant way from the norms of that genre. Kari himself is strongly reminiscent of the somewhere-on-the-spectrum detective Saga Noren in the Danish-Swedish production “The Bridge,” and Kari’s partnership with the former Russian agent Lena Jaakkola (Anu Sinisalo) recalls the pairing of Noren, a Swede, with a Danish detective.
Its Finnishness is partly a matter of isolation: The show takes place in Lappeenranta, a small, isolated city near the Russian border. Kari leaves a high-profile job in Helsinki and takes his family to the woods because he wants a place with “cozy crime.” He of course finds the opposite, partly because of the proximity of Russia, and the dead bodies just keep washing up.
But the show also has a modesty that may be Finnish in nature: Its violence and lurid transgressions are presented with more reserve than usual, and with less of a sense of grim satisfaction. The emotional lives of the detectives in Scandinavian dramas are often bleak, blank books, but “Bordertown” puts an honest focus on Kari’s and Lena’s families and the friendships that develop among them. There are some rays of sun among the noir.
February 17, 2022 at 01:57AM
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/16/arts/television/finland-bordertown-piece-of-my-heart.html
The Little TV Industry That Could - The New York Times
https://news.google.com/search?q=little&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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