How Netflix Transformed Scandinavian TV, From ‘Lilyhammer’ to ‘Billionaire Island’

A dozen years ago, Netflix started a global media revolution in a Norwegian ski resort.

Lilyhammer a fish-out-of-water series set in Lillehammer, Norway featuring ex-Sopranos star Steven Van Zandt as a mafioso on witness protection was the streamer’s first entry into the original series business. A year later came a little show called House of Cards. And the rest is history.

Since then, the Scandinavian TV industry enjoyed a streaming boom and suffered a major bust. HBO Max, which invested heavily in Nordic originals — including the ambitious sci-fi satire Beforeigners from Lilyhammer creators Anne Bjørnstad and Eilif Skodvin — pulled out of the region in 2022, in the wake of the merger that created Warner Bros. Discovery, saying it will no longer produce Nordic originals. Viaplay, a local streaming giant, went all in on Scandi drama in the decade following Netflix’s arrival but, facing massive losses, last year slashed its original content budget, from around 50 to 10 titles a year, and shifted to more cost-conscious non-fiction and cheaper licensed shows from the U.S..

Netflix never stopped betting on the Nordics.

With shows like Danish post-apocalyptic YA drama Rain, Swedish crime series Snabba Cash, and Norwegian monster movie Troll, the streamer put its money into ambitious projects unlikely anything on Scandinavian TV.

“Back in those days, a country like Norway would make maybe 2-3 shows a year,” recalls Lilyhammer co-creator Skodvin. “You had the big shows on the state channel and then maybe a couple of comedies on the commercial networks. With Netflix came the streaming revolution, and everything changed. Suddenly we were able to tell our stories to the entire world.”

12 years on and the company has invested “hundreds of millions of Euros” in original programming in the region, according to Jenny Stjernströmer-Björk, vp of Nordic content at Netflix, “and we will continue to do so.”

With the rest of the region’s streaming services pulling out or scaling back, that level of investment is key for the region’s industry.

“Drama producers [in Scandinavia] have had a rough time recently, particularly with Viaplay’s drama investment collapsing,” says Bjørnstad. “So Netflix’s role is really important now. It’s vital that they keep investing in all the talent that has come out of the boom.”

On Sept. 12, Bjørnstad and Skodvin launched their new Netflix show, Billionaire Island, a Succession-style satire of the ultra-rich, with a very Norwegian twist.

“It’s about these salmon fishing families who have become part of the 1 percent, among the richest people in the world,” says Bjørnstad, “they’re all located on this small island far out in the sea. Over the course of maybe 20 years, six of the island’s inhabitants, out of 5,000, have become billionaires.”

“It’s an American-type soap opera about the superrich, like Dallas or Dynasty, but with salmon fishing,” adds Skodvin.

Billionaire Island has been a hit across Scandinavia, topping the Netflix charts in Norway and making the top 5 in Sweden and Denmark.

Pan-Nordic success stories of this kind are rarer than you’d think. And they are not Netflix’s primary objective. When commissioning a new Nordic original, the goal, says Stjernströmer-Björk, is to be as local as possible.

“With our Danish projects, we’re laser-focused on our Danish members, when we commission a Swedish project, it’s all about our Swedish members, and so forth,” she says. “We are quite small countries and from the outside, we can look very similar: We understand each other’s languages, we share a lot of history but we are also quite different.”

“When I first started working with Netflix, I expected to get all kinds of notes, like ‘Change this so it can work for our Belgian audience or our African audience,’ but I never got that note,” says Kasper Barfoed, a Danish writer/director on medical drama The Nurse and serial killer thriller The Chesnut Man for Netflix. “Instead it’s always: ‘Make this as Danish as you can, get all those little quirks in there.’ I gather their experience is that if it works locally, a series has the best chance of moving across [borders]. But if you try to make it work everywhere, it won’t work anywhere.”

Respecting local creative visions, however, has not meant lowering professional standards. Scandi producers credit the streaming giant with professionalizing the Nordic industry and bringing it up-to-date.

“Take things like intimacy coordinators, which were a completely new thing before Netflix,” says Barfoed. “It was the first time I worked with an intimacy coordinator and it was amazing, it was fantastic. They are pushing us to become more professional, to become better.”

“Before Netflix there really wasn’t a professional industry here, not in that sense,” says Skodvin. “When we make Lilyhammer, we had no idea what we were doing, no idea of budgets, nothing. Now, when you do a show in Scandinavia, you have professionals in every department, people know what they’re doing.”

After a dozen years in the Nordics, it looks like Netflix is here to stay. The streamer’s new Scandi slate, to be unveiled Thursday at the grand opening of Netflix’s new Nordic hub in Stockholm, says Stjernströmer-Björk “is our biggest, boldest and most ambitious to date.” Alongside fiction, the streamer has doubled down on local reality and documentary formats: Love is Blind in Sweden; the non-fiction film A Beautiful REAL Life on Danish singing star Christopher; the Sundance-winning documentary Ibelin about Norwegian gamer Mats Steen.

But having endured an unprecedented boom, followed by a crushing bust, producers in the region remain cautious about the future.

“Netflix is here and they’re commissioning shows, they are developing shows, and that’s good, but the ground is shifting beneath our feet,” says Barfoed. “What will things look like in 5 years, in 10? Will the other players come here, will Amazon, will Apple? Right now, it’s the traditional broadcast networks and it’s Netflix. Is that sustainable? I don’t know.”