My Affair with Nordic Noir

Back in 2009, BBC FOUR started scheduling the Swedish crime series Wallander, starring Krister Henriksson, and it was these feature-length TV movies/episodes that became my introduction to the sub-genre known as 'Nordic Noir'.

A year or so later, the publishing phenomenon that was 'The Millennium Trilogy' (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo etc.) by Stieg Larsson, had become the biggest thing in fiction book sales, with 67 million books being sold worldwide by December 2010, which was just a month before BBC FOUR followed Wallander up with a Danish police procedural drama called Forbrydelsen (The Killing) - a 20 part series based around a single murder case - in Danish, which went on to become the unlikeliest water-cooler TV phenomenon of all time, launching the character of Sarah Lund as an iconic female police detective, which then spawned 2 sequel series and further Scandinavian Noir series such as The Bridge - which itself ran into 3 seasons.

When The Killing Season One came out as a DVD box set in the spring of 2011 I was working at Revolver Entertainment. A ritual at that company was to analyse the sales charts in a weekly company meeting every Tuesday morning, after the sales figures were published. The sales for this highly priced box set (well over ￡50) went through the roof (around 13,000 sets sold week one) and were a total outlier for a foreign language TV Drama set, and the distributor, (who had also picked up home entertainment rights for Wallander) Arrow Films, were clearly onto something...something other distributors were suddenly very keen to get in on. So keen, in fact, that when a new Nordic Noir series came up for grabs - The Bridge, Revolver execs were immediately sent scurrying into the screening room to view the pilot episode, and then hastily posted a rival bid for its U.K. home entertainment rights.

The Bridge also went to Arrow Films, but by that time I'd joined them as Marketing Director. I actually joined Arrow Films just after they had released season 2 of The Killing, at Christmas in 2011, which proved to be another massive seller, and by this time season one had continued to flourish amidst a sea of fawning media articles and tributes, along with Sarah Lund making an unlikely appearance in a dream sequence during the Ab Fab Christmas Special.

My first job at Arrow was the launch of the political drama series Borgen (Series One in Feb 2012). and the first thing I did was to create an umbrella brand for these series (and films) to sit within, with the objective of becoming the home of 'Nordic Noir' TV in the UK. And, henceforth, the NORDIC NOIR TV brand was born.

Incredibly, nobody else had thought to use the term Nordic Noir in a commercial capacity so we were able to secure social media handles and URL's very easily. Borgen was the first release to bear the new brand logo, but was soon followed by The Bridge and also some legacy series such as Unit One and The Protectors, as well as future series of The Killing etc. We also sought out Scandi feature films in the genre.

Our social media accounts caught on in a big way and we live-tweeted episodes during their transmission on BBC Four, and gathered a lot of followers, alongside celebrities (including ex-White House spokesperson Anthony Scaramucci), and were very much seen as the social media voice of the genre. This was somewhat helped by the fact that the BBC themselves were not really set up in a promotional capacity in this way at the time, which lent credibility to our voice. We were, after all, official licensors alongside them, just holding onto different rights.

Soon afterwards a Nordic Noir TV website emerged along with a monthly newsletter and a year later we moved into live events as well. Initially we did Q&A screenings with Rolf Rolf Lassg?rd (Wallander) and Birgitte Hjort S?rensen (Borgen) as part of the Scandinavia Show at Olympia, but those events were to spawn a far more ambitious 2-day festival of our own, 'Nordicana'.

In June 2013 we staged the first festival at the rather atmospheric Farmiloe Building in Islington (that had also been the Gotham Police Department in Batman Begins). and could boast such leading names of the genre as Sidse Babett Knudsen ('Borgen') and most of the cast of the new Swedish Drama 'Arne Dahl', as well as authors and the creators of 'Borgen', on a high-brow panel established in partnership with English Pen, which was moderated by Mark Lawson.

By 2015 - when we did the final Nordicana, we had pretty much worked with every major actor, writer, author and filmmaker in Scandinavia who was working within in this genre. We had made incredible connections with publishers, journalists, celebrities and writers. Marian Keyes, the novelist, moderated one of our panels in 2015 and Emma Kennedy interviewed Sofie Gr?b?l live on stage (who was joined on stage by her 'The Killing' series 1 co-star S?ren Malling), and we even shipped Sofia Helin from The Bridge over along with her iconic olive coloured Porsche in 2014. It was all a rather audacious undertaking, looking back on it - and yes we did have problems along the way...

But, by this time, we also had competition in the form of 'Water Presents', who had taken over the mantle of international drama in terms of (advertising video on demand) streaming (a partnership with Channel 4) - an area we probably should have ring-fenced earlier, and as DVD box set sales declined and the Nordic Noir bubble began to deflate, little by little, the brand became somewhat stretched. It went from Nordic Noir TV to Nordic Noir and Beyond, and now is rebranded as Arrow TV to sit alongside the other Arrow branded labels. We had started to diversify into other European crime series - shows from Italy and France etc. so it became harder and harder to ratify the brand with its original orientation and eventually the company decided to focus more on their cult and horror film label, Arrow Video and started to acquire less series.

Arrow Films sold a phenomenal amount of Nordic Noir DVD box sets during this period of time and also made money from digital transactions on platforms such as iTunes as well as via their subscription channel on Amazon and via Apple TV. At one point the proceeds from the brand made up about half of the entire business of the company. In its Nordic Noir heyday Arrow was also a key influencer in the realm of Scandnavian Crime Drama and we were invited to VIP events at the Swedish and Danish embassies, attended series launches in Denmark and Sweden, and even discussed producing a play in London with some of the stars of the genre, but alas that one never transpired. I look back fondly to a time where I was at the heart of all of this and where Sofie Gr?b?l herself once complimented me on my Danish accent - something you can't help but pick up after watching hours of their television.

Lifelong friendships were forged at our events, many of whom still proudly show off selfies wearing Nordicana t-shirts, emblems of the little cult that we created during that breathless period of time.