If there's no discourse, is it even on TV?

During the Year of Our Shut-In, we fell deep into binging a Danish one-hour drama called Seaside Hotel, or Badehotellet. The trailer on PBS caught our eye because it seemed … like a gentle parody? As if Wes Anderson had made a trailer for a fake PBS series? Even the pitch—Downton Abbey, in Scandinavia, on a beach vacation—sounds like a Prestige Peak TV gag. Here’s a teaser video, to give you a sense of it:

Set in the late 1920s through ‘30s, Seaside Hotel takes place at a summer inn on the North Sea on the Jutland peninsula, with more or less the same regular upper-crust guests returning on vacation every year and mingling to varying degrees of comfort with the staff. Each season is a summer season. The protagonist is a wide-eyed miller’s daughter who leaves home to get a taste of independence, rising quickly (but with integrity!) up the ladder. There’s a gorgeous kitchen with bundles of herbs drying on the walls and rustic cakes always baking, daylight until the wee hours, a madcap jazz score, and lots of delicious summertime frocks and old-fashioned woolen bathing costumes. Multiple affairs, scandalous gossip, class friction, and two dead bodies in season 1 sucked me in. But despite the body count, unlike a lot of shows I watch, this one isn’t built around fucked-up superheroes or grizzled detectives whose dedication to the job masks a deep dysfunction vis-à-vis the living, which, truth be told, I kind of assumed described the entirety of Danish TV.

It’s a strange thing, watching a TV show that nobody else we know watches. Drew and I have in-jokes about the show it seems nobody on this side of the Atlantic shares: the diabolical charms of Kitty Hansen, a particular way to moan the name Morten. Nobody gets my gif references. One of the characters is very into tarot, which excites me. (Next newsletter: My mother’s deck.) Thanks to subtitles, I am slowly learning Danish, if all I need to survive on the North Sea are the words for thanks, kiss, and fishballs. But there’s also the fact that nobody in U.S.-centric digital entertainment discourse audience terms is watching, which means I have nowhere to take my takes except, I suppose, to this newsletter.

I find myself writing takes to myself instead, which I suppose is what I used to call thinking before I learned my opinions could be monetized. The show certainly knows how to work historical themes that resonate today: There’s the Great Depression lurking in the background of season 1, waiting to upset established power balances and further illuminate inequality. There are narratives of women fighting for and sometimes securing self-determination, and a queer love story set in alternating terms of painful forbearance and dignified liberation. There’s antisemitism. And there’s Hitler’s slow, sure rise to power that we learn about secondhand against the backdrop of the idyllic beachfront, first through the radio and later through Mitzi, the deranged dipshit Nazi cousin-wife of one of the guests, whose demented obliviousness is at first ridiculous—aren’t Nazis stupid?! we are perhaps meant to muse—but then turns quite dangerous. There’s a take in there!

But also, so far in the series, there are no non-white characters. And don’t say, but Denmark in the 1930s! We live in a world that saw four centuries of Danish colonialism in Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia. White Denmark wasn’t sitting at home minding its own business. Denmark’s Caribbean colonies were built with the labor of enslaved Africans. But I didn’t know much about that history—and it certainly isn’t referenced in seasons 1-5—until I started wondering about the overwhelming whiteness of the cast, which led me to the story of Hans Jonathan, a cautionary tale about the lengths a people will go to to avoid confronting their past. (Timely theme alert!) Which led me to this story of the 2018 dedication of a 23-foot tall monument in Copenhagen of a Black woman who led “a fiery revolt against Danish colonial rule in the Caribbean” and who was imprisoned in Copenhagen as a result. From the New York Times story:

While the country itself may not have included sizable communities of color in the early part of the 20th century, an exclusively white cast in the 21st century is a choice. I still have three seasons of Badehotellet to watch. And who knows? Perhaps the show will surprise me and the cast will expand to include people of color. Meanwhile, the war in Europe is brewing. The Nazis are coming. One of my favorite characters may not survive them. I think season 1 is available on PBS, and after that, it’s Amazon rentals. Apologies for the take on a show you’re not watching. Tak, tak. Try the fiskeboller.