We have been sitting on the edge of our seats here at home for a few days watching Thomas Vinterberg's latest television drama. In Families Like Ours describes the creator of Festen and Jagten How Denmark is being lifted due to climate change. To do so, he uses no spectacular special effects, no CGI of tidal waves, no huge mass scenes. The world that goes down in Families Like Ours does so in as dull a way as Denmark itself is dull. That makes the series an overwhelming masterpiece.
Times are quite apocalyptic, in recent months, and so this is seeping into the entertainment world. It doesn't happen much in the Netherlands, although Elixir by Dana Nechushtan a nice attempt. With a star-studded cast, success seemed guaranteed for a series where pandemic and conspiracy thinking lead to something beautiful, but someone got worried while writing that it might get boring. A lot also had to be explained, because: suppose people wouldn't pick up on the link to our real pandemic? Then things were compressed and conflated, people sat in more planes and expensive cars than was good for the climate, and so that had to lead to Thomas Vinterberg.
Boring
Vinterberg dares to be boring. Indeed, he has made plot emptiness the norm. The invisible disaster (especially in the first episodes) that afflicts Denmark is not pushed any further. That Denmark needs to be emptied, and its population relocated, is a self-evident fact that no one really opposes very much, except for an occasional casual demonstration as a backdrop. Would many a maker move town and country to portray the inevitable disaster with some fat effects: Vinterberg is about something else.
The series is somewhat indebted to Years and Years by Russel T Davies. Inspired by Brexit and Trump 1, in four episodes it gave a picture of how easy it is: slipping into a far-right dictatorship. He also limited himself to a few characters, kept it close to home and thus, en passant, told a huge story about today. That he is also Dr Who's most successful showrunner does make the series slightly different from Vinterberg's opus.
Technical details
Vinterberg doesn't necessarily want to talk about climate change in Families Like Ours. That is the trigger, nothing more. He doesn't lose himself in technical details. Even better than Spielberg in Jaws, he works with suggestion: that there are puddles in a meadow is something like that one ripple on a calm sea. With him, the real story is in the people. As a viewer, Vinterberg makes you feel very simply what it is like when you have to flee. And not on your own, which would seem exciting to many, but five million at a time.
What happens when you, that privileged, well-educated, hard-working and neatly living socially engaged citizen, are suddenly part of something Geert Wilders would call a tsunami? How does it feel when you, with all your network and accumulated capital, fall into the hands of ruthless human smugglers? What do you do when the receiving country puts a brake on family reunification?
Apeldoorn
We tend to see refugees as weak-minded, sex-crazed and mostly brown-haired subhumans who are only after our women and our wealth. While most of those refugees whom our cabinet wishes the worst possible life for, before leaving, belonged to the upper social class of their country: scientists, journalists, medics, artists. Flight robbed them of any means by which they upheld their dignity. So these refugees are almost always 'families like ours'.
Whether a television series can change anything about the way we as a society look at the rest of the world, I don't know. Vinterberg largely succeeds, precisely because he puts it out there not about says to have. That is perhaps the most important thing.
So to Dutch makers now the task of making something about a group of Apeldoorners who wake up one day while bombs are raining down on the city, hospitals are destroyed and relief supplies are stopped at the border. You could even make it a bit of a boring series. Without effects, but with people.
I would watch.
