(courtesy IMDb (c) Netflix)
Ah but it’s a good and glorious thing to have your expectations thoroughly and robustly thwarted!
Especially when it comes to a TV/streaming show such as Love & Anarchy (Kärlek & anarki), a Swedish series which presents itself in its whimsically light and frothy trailer as a bright and breezy rom-com about a workplace flirtation-turned-to-love but which turns out to carry a considerable amount more emotional heft than that, investing time and narrative in a thoughtful examination of its richly and fulsomely realised characters and their lives in and around a publishing house working hard to stay in business.
This quirky, fun and surprisingly emotionally meaningful show centres on Sofie (Ida Engvoll), an in-demand future strategist who is brought on as a consultant to august publishing house Lund & Lagerstedt by dithering CEO Ronny (Björn Kjellman) in a bid to bring it kicking and screaming into the digital age.
With the world as a whole, and publishing in particular changing in massively transformative ways, Lund & Lagerstedt must grow and adapt if its to continue on its mission to publish that are intellectually rigorous but also accessibly mass market too.
Sofie is accepted far more easily than you might expect from people who should be fearing for their jobs – they do, of course, but Sofie assures them she’s not here to lop the axe on staff members which calms anxiety levels quite considerably – and settles into the job of steering the publishing house to digitally greener, hopefully more profitable pastures.
Everything goes relatively smoothly bar her continual run-ins with the much younger and very cute IT guy, Max (Björn Mosten), a prickly relationship which quickly turns to playful flirtation as each dares the other to do something out of the norm from walking backwards all da to causing anarchy in a staff meeting.
Both Sofie and Max share more in common than they think, with each of them, despite their wildly divergent places in life – Sofie is married to filmmaker Johan (Johannes Bah Kuhnke), a controlling, almost stifling presence in his wife’s life and has two kids while Max is new to Stockholm, having left his country roots behind to escape a critical, difficult mother – and soon find themselves getting closer and closer as they try to inject life with demonstrably absent sparkle and excitement.
While the rom-com aspect of things does occupy a sizable chunk of narrative real estate, Love & Anarchy (Kärlek & anarki) surprises by devoting as much, if not more, time to the machinations of Lund & Lagerstedt where literary director Friedrich (Reine Brynolfsson) and sales and promotion director Denise (Gizem Suna Kling Erdogan) are doing their best to share creative direction for the publishing house and to deal with the firm’s authors who are either delightful or fiendishly problematic.
Thrown into the mix too is Caroline (Carla Sehn), the receptionist for the publishing house who is the first to stop that her affections for Max won’t be returned because his focus well and truly lies elsewhere, and to read the dropped-in manuscript of a writer who, it turns out, may be the biggest thing to happen to Lund & Lagerstedt right when they need a breakout hit the most.
While the rom-com back-and-forth between Max and Sofie, who is also contending with her unfulfilled writing dreams and her father’s continuing mental health issues which see him cause the kind of havoc her finely-balanced family can ill afford, is fun and playful and more than lives up the promise of the trailer, it’s the fact that Love & Anarchy (Kärlek & anarki) beds that down in the wider context of the publishing house which really gives the kind of narrative depth and appeal to go far beyond the expected romantic shenanigans.
You go from thinking that the show will be all silly grins and increasing attraction between Max and Sofie – even that though is finely and nuancedly handled in ways that prove as tender and affectionate as they are riotously, romantically comical – to appreciating the fact that it dives deep into the the travails of the modern corporate and media landscape and into the lives of people whose experience of the publishing industry is about to be challenged and changed in ways they will really have to work hard to surmount.
Love & Anarchy (Kärlek & anarki) then is a highly intelligent and thoughtful show, a lighthearted but also weighty drama that isn’t afraid to bounce the silly and the serious around and hold them in prefect tension, offering off up goofy laughs at on point before racing straight into some very dark nights of the soul indeed.
Being willing to give us intimate and groundedly honest looks into the lives of its characters means that far from being dismissed as the on-note narrative-serving characters they could so easily have been, people like Sofia, Max, Friedrich and Denise, even lovely timid Caroline, are afforded the time and detail to be fully rounded and for viewers to really care about them as a result.
This focus on robust, affecting characterisation bolsters a thoughtfully involved narrative and a knack for naturalistically written and delivered dialogue and gives Love & Anarchy (Kärlek & anarki) a real substance and value far beyond anything you might have expected, proving that while promotional trailers are fun and inviting in to a program, it’s never wise to assume that’s the end of the story because so much more could be lying in wait.
And yes there is a second season so stay tuned for that review coming soon …