If you’re part of an extended family, how would you feel if the country you called home your entire life shut down for good, forcing all of its citizens to evacuate? How would the familial bonds fostered over your lifetime change or break? That’s the theme of a scarily plausible Danish drama.
Opening Shot: Cars driving onto a crowded ferry as thousands of Danes migrate from their home country, which is closing down, to Poland.
The Gist: Six months earlier, Nikolaj (Esben Smed), who works at Denmark’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is called into a meeting by the foreign minister, who tells the gathered staff that the government is going to announce in a few days that the country will be closed down, due to rising water levels.
They’ve mentioned this extreme option a number of times, but this time it seems that they’re serious. The Netherlands’ economy collapsed due the cost of keeping rising water at bay, and the Danish government figures it’s better to shut it down and have an organized migration to neighboring countries in Europe while the borders of those countries are still open.
Despite being told by the foreign minister not to tell anyone, Nikolaj immediately texts his husband Henrik (Magnus Milang) and tells him to sell all of his family’s commercial properties, and fast. Nikolaj and Henrik eventually tells Nikolaj’s brother-in-law Jacob (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), an architect on those now-defunct commercial projects. They encourage him to sell their house and get as much cash as he can/
Jacob’s daughter Laura (Amaryllis August), a high schooler who shuttles between her father’s suburban home and the apartment of her mother Fanny (Paprika Steen). finds herself intensely attracted to Elias (Albert Rudbeck Lindhart), a boy at school. She even has sexual fantasies about him. For his part, Elias is also attracted, but he shows it in ways like buying a new pedal for her her bike when he accidentally breaks it off. When a realtor visits the house while Laura is there, Jacob ends up telling her about the decision to shut down the country, which everyone else in Denmark finds out about much sooner than originally thought.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Families Like Ours has a similar intense family drama vibe as This Is Us, with touches of apocalyptic shows like The Last Of Us.
Our Take: It’s not too harsh to say that the first episode of Families Like Ours is exceedingly depressing to watch. The situation that it’s setting up is that the nation of Denmark is going to be pragmatic about its future in the face of climate change and completely shut down the country. And while the evacuation and migration of its citizens is depicted as orderly, the idea that millions of people are going to have to uproot their lives and start over — most with nothing — is scary to contemplate. Why scary? Because it seems like an entirely plausible near-future scenario.
While the shutdown and mass migration are the impetus to the changes that will be taking place in Jacob’s extended family as well as the lives of some of the other characters, the series is at its heart a family drama like the aforementioned This Is Us.
The main story is going to be Laura and Elias’ growing relationship in the months before most of the populace is ordered to leave the country and her having a really tough choice — go with her dad, with her mom, or with Elias. But there are other stories that will be woven through, like Nikolaj and Henrik looking to expand their family at this very crazy time; Henrik’s dealings with his homophobic brother Peter (David Dencik); a woman named Christel (Asta Kamma August) having to manage the anger issues of her son Lucas (Max Kaysen Høyrup), whom Laura cares for in one of her afterschool jobs.
As the evacuation spreads all of them across Europe, all of their issues and problems will be heightened and their connections with each other strained. And that’s where the real drama will come from. Sure, there’s still going to be that existential anxiety over the demise of a nation hanging over the series. But when it comes right down to it, we’re going to want to see how these relationships change and evolve as Denmark shuts down for good.
Sex and Skin: There’s some slight nudity in a scene where Laura fantasizes about Elias.
Parting Shot: After an assembly where Laura and her class are told about the shutdown, Elias finds Laura and they give each other a long hug.
Sleeper Star: We don’t know a whole lot about Paprika Steen’s character Fanny, who is Laura’s mother. But there is a history there that seems fraught with drama, which will of course be exacerbated by the stress of the evacuation.
Most Pilot-y Line: When Jacob tells his wife Amalie (Helene Reingaard Neumann) about the shutdown, they’re in bed. She literally rolls over and throws up on the carpet from the sudden stress of that news. Sure, that’s a dramatic reaction, but she could have run to the bathroom first, right?
Our Call: STREAM IT. While the evacuation aspect of Families Like Us makes us almost as queasy as one of the characters became while hearing that news, it does set up an interesting circumstance to explore family bonds and how they change in extreme situations.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.