Borgen reveals the yearnings of north Europeans just as well. They want a leader who is tough and resourceful, but also compassionate and just. Modern voters are not so different from peasants who prayed for a good tsar, or tenants who wanted landlords to prove they were true gentlemen by displaying noblesse oblige. The War on Terror looms large — a welcome contrast with the self-censorship of British television that could not acknowledge that real spies were fighting Islamists even in series after series of Spooks. Nyborg is both realistic and liberal when she confronts the post 9/11 world. She arrests a dissident to keep a pro-Western dictator happy, but ensures that the tyrant cannot send him to his prisons. She hushes up a scandal about the CIA using an airbase in the Danish colony of Greenland to transport prisoners to Guantánamo, but then ignores her subservient defence ministers and civil servants, and confronts the Americans in private. Although it is harder-edged than The West Wing, the dreams of rich-world liberals still determine the plot.
So, inadvertently, do their blind spots. Danish television made the first series of Borgen in early 2010. Yet the European Union does not figure in the script. Even in Denmark and Britain, which are outside the euro, even before the single currency pushed Europe into crisis, no real leader could pass a week without thinking about Brussels. The politicians in Borgen never mention it.
I've commented in Standpoint before about how artists and writers stopped being the canary in the coalmine in the first decade of the 21st century. Their old ability to sense weakness deserted them. In America and particularly Britain, the absence of dramas about a raging bull market heading for a crash was remarkable. On the continent, writers did not look at the EU and wonder if it could hold togther. They thought the status quo could last forever, and were as shocked as the politicians and journalists when it fell apart.
When I asked a Danish reporter why the writers of Borgen pretended that the EU did not exist, she cried, "But Europe's boring!" Then she checked herself and added, "It's not now, is it?"
