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Each is aggrieved but indomitable, a working-class Sisyphus pushing ahead through institutional neglect and cowardice \u2014 a very squeaky wheel at work \u2014 while weighed down by personal trauma. Each is estranged from the only close family member still in her life; two become reluctant surrogate mothers to the women their troubled sons get pregnant. Perhaps Grabol has been typecast over the years, or has typecast herself. Or maybe the grouchy, standoffish, self-righteous pain in the butt is a character that resonates in Denmark.<\/p>\n
Grabol is an economical actor, able to communicate a world of emotion through her liquid eyes and seemingly offhand movements. (She\u2019s also blessed with a notably dramatic pair of eyebrows.) She makes all of these bottled-up, difficult women believable and, even when they push everyone away, sympathetic \u2014 you can see the layers of pain and weariness that they shelter behind and occasionally break through.<\/p>\n
The shows share a sensibility with Grabol\u2019s performances; they are unflashy, meticulously made, superior examples of their genres. (\u201cThe Killing\u201d was a trendsetter in transferring the outr\u00e9 violence of 1990s movie murderers into TV, but it presented their offenses with a Nordic reserve.)<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Shift\u201d is a forthright hospital melodrama, and there\u2019s even an amusing twist on \u201cGrey\u2019s Anatomy\u201d in which Ella is followed around the hospital by her mother, an orderly who breaks into meetings to pester her daughter about her health and love life. The mostly female midwives serve the dramatic function that nurses often do in American stories, putting up with and bailing out the mostly male doctors. The show\u2019s theme is the chronic understaffing of midwives in the public hospital, while its running motif is the staff\u2019s obsession with food, from the critical attention paid to the pastries in the break room to the prescribing of toast and tea for all noncritical medical issues.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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But in the hands of its creator and showrunner, the talented director Lone Scherfig (\u201cAn Education\u201d), \u201cThe Shift\u201d (the Danish title translates as \u201cDay and Night\u201d) has a winning sincerity and humor; it isn\u2019t cloying, and it doesn\u2019t traffic in bad outcomes to gin up emotion. Tricky story lines \u2014 a midwife who doubts herself when she\u2019s gaslighted by a struggling doctor, another who sees her patients through the lens of her own history of abuse \u2014 are handled delicately. Ella fights for more midwives and finds herself pregnant at 46 (by a married doctor), but she\u2019s chipper and funny, and Grabol gets to show a slightly softer side.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cPrisoner,\u201d created by Kim Fupz Aakeson with Frederik Louis Hviid and Michael Noer and written by Aakeson (who, in the small world of Danish TV, wrote two episodes of \u201cThe Shift\u201d), takes the critique of the country\u2019s social welfare in a much darker direction. It is structured as a tragedy: Three guards at a failing prison all have fatal vulnerabilities \u2014 a secret love life, a junkie son with debts, a friendship with an inmate \u2014 that drag them down into a tense and cleverly worked-out spiral of lies and vengeance.<\/p>\n
Grabol is primary in the ensemble of \u201cThe Shift,\u201d but in \u201cPrisoner\u201d the attention is evenly split among her, Youssef Wayne Hvidtfeldt as the idealistic new guard Sammi and David Dencik as the compromised veteran Henrik. It\u2019s largely Dencik\u2019s show. Henrik, who vacillates between surly anger and puppy dog neediness, is the most interesting character, and Dencik (\u201cTinker Tailor Soldier Spy,\u201d \u201cChernobyl\u201d) is terrific.<\/p>\n
The beat-downs, drug runs, racial animosities and inevitable spasm of group violence are all familiar, but in its six fairly tight episodes, \u201cPrisoner\u201d makes them credible and achieves a fair measure of the documentary-style grittiness it goes for. Grabol\u2019s Miriam goes down some dark roads \u2014 she\u2019s not the justice-obsessed grind of \u201cThe Killing\u201d or the dedicated crusader of \u201cThe Shift\u201d \u2014 but her heart is in the right place. Denmark is still lucky to have her.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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