In “The Fortress,” a new series about pandemic, isolationism and government corruption, something is rotten in the state of Norway. The year is 2037, and the country has spent the last decade cut off from the rest of the world, behind a wall of its own making. When a deadly virus sweeps through the land, the prime minister blames refugees for bringing the illness to an insulated paradise.
But in this case, the menace is a domestic breed. And the government will do anything to cover up its origins.
A sociopolitical thriller and a parable, “The Fortress,” a seven-part Norwegian series, made its American debut on Tuesday, the latest in a wave of Scandinavian dramas cresting on American shores in recent years that tend to be brainy, rooted in reality and, yes, chilly. (This one is available on Viaplay.)
It is also timely — dystopian and futuristic but only just, playing off the rising tide of isolationism in Europe and around the world in these post-pandemic, post-Brexit, “build the wall” times.
“Our main theme is that to solve the world’s problems, everybody needs everybody,” said John Kare Raake, a co-creator of the show and its lead writer, in a video interview from his home in Oslo. “We can’t just say, ‘That’s not our problem.’ We have to work together and decide that we can relate to problems in other countries that are not at our doorstep.”
With a star-filled cast and an award-winning script (it won best screenplay last year at the Series Mania festival in Europe), “The Fortress” is a high-profile venture for Viaplay, a Swedish-based streamer that made its North American debut only last year. The show’s assortment of characters representing the different strata of Norwegian society are played by some heavy hitters of international drama.
Tobias Santelmann (“Exit”) plays the prime minister; Rebekka Nystabakk (“Twin”) plays his icy deputy, who helps try to spin the news cycle with an ambitious new speechwriter ( Eili Harboe, who portrayed the shifty GoJo communications head in the final season of “Succession”). A food safety researcher (Selome Emnetu) scrambles to create a vaccine, even as she is imprisoned for blowing the whistle on the inconvenient truth of the pandemic’s origins.
Russell Tovey (a British actor who played Truman Capote’s abusive lover in the most recent season of “Feud”) appears as a refugee from England who is hunted by the military; he knows too much, and he might unknowingly hold the key to a vaccine breakthrough.
The series often plays like a Scandinavian take on the great paranoid thrillers of 1970s Hollywood, including “Three Days of the Condor,” “The Parallax View” and “All the President’s Men”; like that last film, it even features tense, clandestine meetings in a parking garage. Raake and the show’s other creator, Linn-Jeanethe Kyed, craft a quietly vertiginous feeling of dread, fueled by the sense that almost nobody here can be trusted.
Technology rings familiar but ups the ante on invasiveness: Drones are ubiquitous, scanning faces for identification; a government-run A.I. network provides information on private citizens in a flash. “The Fortress” is more realpolitik than science fiction.
For all its resonance with the events and fears spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic, the seed of the idea came to Raake years before, he said — back in 2014, during the early days of the refugee crisis in Europe.
According to Pew Research Center, 1.3 million refugees and migrants came to Europe seeking asylum in 2015. Responses varied within each country, ranging from acceptance and tolerance to xenophobia and a renewed isolationist fervor. Norway’s neighbor Sweden initially announced an open-door policy; it shut that door in late 2015 with new measures to make asylum more difficult. Countries including Hungary and Poland have built border fences to prevent illegal immigration.
This period also brought Brexit, England’s departure from the European Union, and bellicose calls from Donald J. Trump, then a presidential candidate, to build a wall along the border between the United States and Mexico.
“This kind of isolationism is not unique to Norway in any way,” Raake said. “It’s all over the world.”
But “The Fortress” is also very much a thriller for the Covid age. Viaplay picked up the series in 2018, and as the idea evolved, the real-life pandemic commenced, and Raake and Kyed found themselves adjusting the premise to current events. The masks — sleek plastic contraptions that cover most of the face — play a starring role in the finished series. The politicization of the scramble to create a vaccine should ring eerily familiar.
As the series moved toward production, Raake was concerned that Covid would make “The Fortress” a harder sell for audiences.
“In the middle of the pandemic, the thought was, ‘Who wants to have this thriller about something happening right outside your house?’” Raake said.
Then he noticed that “Contagion,” Steven Soderbergh’s detailed, deeply cynical 2011 movie about a deadly outbreak, was climbing the most-watched list on his Netflix home screen. Perhaps there was still a public appetite for material like his. Shooting began in 2021.
By then, social distancing and regular testing were facts of life. An actor would test positive and production would shut down, as the pandemic put a temporary halt to this pandemic story. Story lines were rewritten on the fly to account for who might be available on a given day.
“We were isolated while shooting and everyone had masks on, and then you are performing these scenes where everybody’s got masks on,” Tovey said in a video interview from his home in London. “So the method actor in me was satisfied because I had material around me consistently.”
On a more fundamental level, “The Fortress” is about the politics of imports and exports. Norway, a country of fewer than 6 million people that borders Finland, Sweden and Russia, is Europe’s largest gas producer and exporter. It has huge reserves of seafood and fresh water, an important factor in the series. (Its central crisis begins with the creation of a vaccine to prevent salmon from getting sick.) But the country also imports much of its produce and animal feed.
“We were an old farming country and pretty self-sufficient,” said Harboe, who plays the enigmatic speechwriter, from her home in Oslo. “But now we also rely on imported goods. Our consumed food is 60 percent imported, even though we have a lot of beautiful, farmed land that we could use more of.”
In the Norway of “The Fortress” the government has grown tired of sharing its plentiful energy reserves and is wary of an outside world marred by crime, climate change and refugee crises. Self-sufficiency is the national mantra. The country has rejected international cooperation at every level, and at a terrible price.
Back in the real world, one Norwegian export doing quite well is television. The country is part of the continuing craze for “Nordic noir,” with Norwegian thrillers including “Occupied” and “Wisting” providing cerebral chills.
More stories of Norway are reaching the rest of the world in the streaming age — including one that imagines a dystopian world of nationalist retrenchment.
“When I started in the business, there was a limit to how many things we could produce,” Raake said, adding: “Now we have a lot more people to pitch shows to. The world is getting smaller, and we’re getting bigger.”
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