Fish feud
Lilyhammer creators Eilif Skodvin and Anne Bjørnstad return to Netflix with Billionaire Island, a comedy-drama about two families fighting for control of Norway’s salmon farming industry. They tell DQ about blending drama with soap-style humour and being there at the start of the streaming revolution.
The television streaming revolution began with a fish-out-of-water story about a former New York mobster who enters the witness protection programme, only to find himself living in a quiet Norwegian town.
Lilyhammer was originally produced for Norway’s NRK, but it became Netflix’s first ‘original’ series when the fledgling SVoD platform launched it to subscribers in the US, Canada and Latin America in February 2012.
The rest, as they say, is history. And now, 12 years later, Lilyhammer creators Eilif Skodvin and Anne Bjørnstad have reunited with Netflix for their latest series, comedy-drama Billionaire Island.
Blending elements of HBO’s Succession and Showtime’s Billions with classic soaps such as Dallas and Dynasty, set against the picturesque Norwegian landscape, the series examines the hugely successful – and profitable – salmon farming industry from the perspective of two rival companies, each led by extremely wealthy families with very different approaches to life.
“The salmon industry is quite new, the whole idea of farming fish in the sea is very new, and we suddenly realised that it’s been incredibly successful financially speaking,” Bjørnstad tells DQ. “So over the course of 20 years, a lot of people have become insanely rich in Norway because of this new industry, and we just thought it was very interesting how these people live in a very rural area in Norway. Before, people were always talking about how the coast was depopulated and everything was going down the drain. Now, suddenly, the richest people in the world live there. It’s fascinating.”
“It’s transformed a lot of these societies,” says Skodvin. “There are people coming from different places in the world to work in this industry – and they sell fish to the entire world. Wealth is one thing, but globalisation is another issue. The idea of pursuing these interests while also doing a classical soapy-type battle between two families just appealed to us.”
Debuting on September 12, the series stars Trine Wiggen as Julie Lange, the CEO of Marlax, one of the leading producers of Atlantic salmon. When she sparks a hostile takeover of rival firm Meyer-Fjordbruk – led by Gjert Meyer (Svein Roger Karlsen) – she dreams of building the largest salmon producer in the world. But while Julie is keeping secrets from her family to get what she wants, Gjert’s own family are standing by his side and willing to do what it takes to stop her business ambitions.
The Lange family includes Julie’s husband Torbjørn (Kåre Conradi) and their children Hennie (Nemi Storm), JJ (Vestle Røsten Granås) and Amy (Ragne Grand), Julie’s daughter from a previous relationship. Among the Meyers, meanwhile, are Gjert’s daughter Trine (Hanne Skille Reitan), his grandson Felix (Benjamin Bakkeid) and Trine’s husband Eigil (Tor Ivar Hagen), who is also the current CEO of Meyer-Fjordbruk.
Set on the fictional island of Brima, Trøndelag, but filmed on the real Trøndelag island of Frøya, the series sees the two families living side by side, though they have very different outlooks on life. While the Langes enjoy the trappings of their extreme wealth, the Meyers are very traditional. “I would say they are almost hyper-Norwegian,” Bjørnstad says. “Part of it is that it’s a family drama, and it turns out family life doesn’t get any easier if they get billions of kroner all of a sudden.”
“Globalisation is a key theme here,” says Skodvin. “You have one family that’s very anchored in Norwegian ways. Their son is in the marching band and he’s always listening to classical Norwegian music. And then the other family has one daughter who went to London and had a K-Pop band perform for one of the daughters’ confirmation parties.”
Though the series isn’t biographical in any way, the writers were inspired by real people and real events as they sought to create characters and ‘ethical dilemmas’ that viewers around the world could recognise.
“When you create characters for a show, it’s reality,” says Skodvin. “We see rich people in Norway, particularly in the fish farming industry. How do they present themselves? How does suddenly being a big success in an international industry affect their lives?
“A lot of these entrepreneurs are still living in the same neighbourhoods that they used to live in, which creates a special way of belonging to that 1% that basically owns half the world. It’s a kind of Norwegian way of belonging to that group, which we explore in this show and these characters.”
“The fact that Norway’s very egalitarian, to be a billionaire in Norway is very different from the US I imagine, because in Norway they will take great care not to seem stuck up or arrogant,” Bjørnstad notes. “They have to pretend they’re the same person they were before. They stay in the same place. Their kids go to school with the same kids that are not billionaires, and they have to play a game where they pretend to be the same person they were before this happened.”
The environment and animal welfare are other themes in the series, which is produced by Rubicon. Documentary news footage sets the scene early in the show, including moments of protest against salmon farming, while the numerous establishing shots of the Norwegian landscape show signs of industry, from windmills to the recognisable fish farming nets floating off the coast.
As the series acknowledges, Norway is also credited with popularising the use of salmon in sushi, a traditional Japanese dish, and helping to turn the country’s salmon farms into a hugely valuable global industry.
“Gradually we get more into that stuff, but we don’t like to preach in our shows. This is not really about our views,” Skodvin says. “You have these dual narratives in Norwegian society. You have the industry itself saying, ‘We are the new oil. We are saving the Norwegian economy.’ Then you have the narrative of the environmentalist, which is, ‘They are destroying the seas. The salmon are escaping and threaten wild salmon.’ There are very different narratives around what’s going on here, and that’s what interests us as storytellers. These tensions are what, in our view, create interesting drama rather than didactic storytelling.”
But despite highlighting the real-world implications of salmon farming, Billionaire Island is “mostly a fun show,” Skodvin says, with he and Bjørnstad injecting the series with the lighter tone of those aforementioned US soaps.
“Compared to contemporary shows about rich people, our show feels quite different to those because it just looks very different. They are all glass and steel and they’re cold. We have the occasional helicopter as well, but it’s very much in nature and a rural setting. In that way, it has more of a visceral feel like Yellowstone.”
The writers, who are husband and wife, worked together on chatshows I kveld med Thomas Giertsen, Endelig fredag, Mandagsklubben and comedy Rikets røst before they created Lilyhammer together. Running for three seasons, it starred Steven Van Zandt (The Sopranos) as Frank Tagliano, who testifies against a Mafia head and then enters witness protection, asking to be sent to the Norwegian town of Lillehammer, where he thinks no one will find him.
They then worked on TV2 comedy Roeng, before creating HBO Nordic crime series Beforeigners, in which people from different time periods inexplicably appear in modern-day Oslo.
Although their drama series might appear to be quite different, Skodvin and Bjørnstad repeatedly return to exploring the tension between the local and the global, whether a US gangster clashes with small-town Norwegian values or family life butts up against a billion-dollar industry. They are also all stories that make them feel like they are taking a huge risk, hoping viewers join them for the ride.
“People watching it would recognise the comedy, the satire and some of the tensions between the small world of the characters and the big stuff out in the world that influences them,” Skodvin says. “There is a thread here. And of course, the shows are also locally made shows, very Norwegian shows, but that are streaming on big platforms. You’re trying to show this very particular Norwegian story to the world. We are connected to our own theme.”
“With Lilyhammer, we had no idea it was going to air anywhere else other than Norway. When it did, it was so surprising,” Bjørnstad says. “But it seems like if it works, it works. It’s the same with this show that’s very local, very specific, about salmon farming and Norwegian politics.”
As the “first big drama series” the writers created together, Lilyhammer involved a lot of experimentation to work out how they would pen the scripts as a pair. Over time, their method has evolved to mean that now they open a writers room with younger collaborators, talk through each episode and map out the story arc. They then separate to write scripts individually before passing drafts between them until no one episode is purely one person’s work.
“It’s a very collaborative process, and I would also say we work very tightly with the directors,” says Skodvin. “We give them a lot of responsibility. We’re not the type of showrunners that are out on set every day. We work with real directors who are very committed to the project.”
The lead director on Billionaire Island is Marit Moum Aune (Made in Oslo), who Skodvin describes as one of Norway’s “greatest theatre directors.” Bjørnstad also directed three episodes, having made her directorial debut on Roeng.
“I love being on set when I’m directing. When I’m just writing, I am not so fond of being on set because then you’re just in the way,” she says. “I have had the pleasure to work very closely with a lot of directors. It’s really a privilege to see how they do their job, and it makes it easier to try it yourself.
“What I was most nervous about was the personal instruction part of it. But I soon realised the actors always just want to know ‘where I’m coming from’ or ‘what just happened to me.’ When you have written the script, it’s really easy to help them shape the story.”
Twelve years ago, Skodvin and Bjørnstad didn’t believe Van Zandt when he said audiences in the US would love Lilyhammer. Bjørnstad remembers thinking the notion was “absurd,” and the pair couldn’t imagine international viewers tuning into a Norwegian series. “Viewership has very much changed. When the UK made The Office, the Americans remade it. The Office – it’s in English,” Skodvin says. “Now we watch Squid Game. But in those early days, we didn’t see that happening.
“Now stories travel in a completely different way. I remember the old days when we watched Norwegian TV shows and American TV shows. That was it. Now we watch shows from all over the world – Korean shows, Japanese shows, Turkish shows, other European shows. That’s credit to this streaming service where everything is equally distributed. When you believe in it in the local market and you think it’s good, they just put it out there. And it’s for everyone to enjoy.”
Seeing Lilyhammer on Netflix remains a “really strange experience,” Bjørnstad says. “It was something we had never even been close to imagining. It was just so strange. The only thing we have learned is you can’t know what to expect. Something really strange is always happening.”
tagged in: Anne Bjørnstad, Billionaire Island, Eilif Skodvin, Lilyhammer, Netflix with, Rubicon