Let me now turn to some highlights from the audience research. First, we found something I call a social media blackout. A generation of viewers in University, or starting work and raising a family, tend to stream content in order to watch television when and how they want. But Bron/Broen season 3 inspired retro television viewing, watching live as a social ritual for Bron/Broen Sundays. The speed with which streaming television has dominated the market in Sweden and Denmark has an impact on this anti-streaming trend. In the following conversation from a focus group, some Swedish students discussed the social value of this public service drama:
It’s almost like going back to the old way of watching TV, it’s like a ritual… Old television. With other shows, you barely know when they’re on, but with Bron you do. (23 year old Swedish female student)
I agree that it feels like when you were young. If you watch Netflix you plough through all the episodes. (24 year old Swedish male student)
The pressure of ‘I’ve seen all of it now.’ Bron is the only show we watch together on TV at nine o’clock. Everything else is streaming when you have the time. (23 year old Swedish male student)
It’s more of an emotional and an intellectual investment to watch Bron. You have to make an effort. Paradise Hotel is okay to watch at work or while you’re texting someone… It’s not the same with Bron. Sometimes I pick up my phone, and I stop myself – ‘no, I need to focus.’ (24 year old Swedish male student)
We found something similar in Britain for Bridge Saturdays on BBC4, a social media blackout, but this time for a somewhat older audience. ‘If you phone me up when we are watching the Bridge, I would pause it and tell you we are watching the Bridge, call me later’ (44 year old Italian female architect ). Indeed, the art of watching subtitles became a new skill for these regular viewers. One woman gave The Bridge the ultimate praise, it was so gripping she had to put down her knitting.
But, something very different was going on in American and Mexico. Because of the commercial channel, and invasive advertising, viewers sought out the drama as catch up, or online, so they could stream without adverts, or dubbing. One viewer, a Mexican, Colombian lawyer, even worked out how to download the series illegally, finding the subtitles separately, and remixing it together for an
immersive crime drama experience. When you are in a time bind, immersing yourself in this crime drama is the highlight of the week, and adverts are to be avoided at all costs. One American woman explained: ‘I have one or two hours in the evening to relax and the rest of my day is “forget it!” fully booked, so that little bit of time that I have by then, when my eyes hurt and everything hurts, The Bridge is relaxation for me…’ (42 year old American female sales director) Here, we can see Bron/Broen and The Bridge as an antidote to the pressures of working life, streaming television drama in blocks, checking social media and multi-tasking. For these viewers, there is pleasure to be taken in investing something of yourself, time, emotion and energy into the series. They describe the viewing experience as a social contract, an emotional and intellectual investment between the producers and audiences in creating quality drama that is worth it.
Another finding was serial engagement. This is the way audiences build up their engagement year on year with the series. For example Saga Noren has become the core identity of the drama: Saga is Bron/Broen. But, it didn’t start out this way for the producers, performers or audiences of the series. From the first season, Saga was both a distinctive feature of the drama, what singled Bron/Broen out from other crime, and also a challenge to viewers in how to relate to her personality.
Audiences had to learn how to engage with Saga through emotional identification with her personality: ‘At first I thought she was just completely annoying but she’s grown on me. Saga is totally unpredictable, I can’t figure her out. I like her incredibly direct way’ (38 year old Danish female journalist).
The focus on Saga in season three was a creative risk that paid off with audiences who, through the process of serial engagement, became Saga’s main supporters:
‘Come on, Saga, stand up for yourself! Ignore that bitch!’ (22 year old Swedish female student). Audiences reacted strongly to her vulnerability: ‘Saga’s shield has been dismantled’ (46 year old Swedish female communications officer). Another noted ‘I feel she becomes more and more humane. She now does things that you couldn’t imagine in the first episode’ (47 year old Danish male support worker).
And how viewers reacted to Saga made them reflect on wider issues: ‘We’ve talked about how there should be more room for different types of people in our society… we should look a little further before we judge people’ (37 year old Danish female accountant).
If we briefly look at the transnational audiences for the American/Mexican version of the drama we see serial engagement with the character of Saga take a different shape.
Show runner Elwood Reid transitioned from the format to an original drama:
‘they gave me the script characters and border situation so I took that and wanted to tell a huge, scrolling story’ (2014). Reid took the original characters of the criminal detectives Sonya Cross (from America) and Marco Ruiz (from Mexico) and added further compelling characters in an ensemble drama, notably the female killer played by Franke Potente who could have easily been in a series all of her own. Described by one viewer: ‘Oh my God, she scared the shit out of me.
… she is pure damage... (46 year old American female retail store owner). Such a move allowed for regional variation. American-Mexican viewers found the Sonya’s character difficult to like, and were more critical of the performance of the actress. Reid used new characters to broaden audience engagement with the border situation, taking the drama beyond a reliance on one or two characters, to a range of characters from starkly different regional and life experiences. Viewers described this as the Breaking Bad version of Bron, where the characters were in survival mode in this challenging border territory.
The cultural resonance of Bron/Broen is striking when we look at how transregional audiences reflected on the drama in relation to their lives. The world of Bron/Broen signifies not Malmö and Copenhagen but one city, specially created for the look and feel of Nordic Noir. As this viewer explained:
As a citizen of Öresund, I think the co-operation between Sweden and Denmark was much more obvious in the first season, less so in the second one, and then in season three it’s normal. To me, it’s like: ‘Well, it would be great if it was really like that’: a little utopia without borders. (45 year old Swedish female head of communications)
For some viewers there was value in the ideals of cross border co-operation. The drama signified a desire for understanding across differences: ‘Malmö and Copenhagen feel like one piece, where all the incidents are happening in one land.
It doesn’t seem like two countries, it seems like one country. It’s very beautifully portrayed’ (27 year old Swedish-Egyptian female dancer). The imaginary city of Bron-Broen is a place marked by its dramatic power to unite across cultures. Even the physical location of the bridge came to symbolise the social imaginary of the
drama, and its liberal democratic ideals, rather than the real world of migration and border control within the politics of the European Union.
Overall, this research has shown how producers and audiences engage with Nordic noir as quality drama; every detail of landscape, colour, light and sound, snowfall, dialogue and plot twists, editing and acting, pulls audiences into a powerful narrative that has long lasting cultural resonance. The continuing success of Nordic Noir lies in its ability to touch people deeply through strong and multilayered storytelling, where the drama becomes ‘part of you, I get emotionally involved; it’s like you enter that world and you live in it’ (39 year old Swedish female communications officer).
We were able to show producers that not only did they make a connection but their work had a lasting impact on audiences, in their daily lives, memories, and dreams. This is what academics can offer industries in the new currencies of engagement, where the relationship between producer and audience is pivotal.