Get Occupied

I must have mentioned it once before, but I've nearly finished season 1 of the Norwegian/Euro TV series Occupied (on Netflix) and I have an urge to again commend it to readers. 

The thing that keeps coming to mind is that the scale of the production (for a political drama involving a more-or-less by stealth takeover of Norway by Russia) is relatively small - it doesn't look cheap but it still has a limited budget feel, meaning it doesn't have the largest cast and government meetings all look smaller than what you expect in reality, even in a small country - and that makes comparison with Australian TV  drama pretty easy.

But it is so much better than any similar attempt at a political intrigue show made here.

OK - it's not as if I am being all that fair, because I don't even attempt to watch Australian drama anymore.  (I had a look at half an hour of Harrow last Sunday - interested only because it is set in Brisbane and is in a second series, so someone must be watching it - and it was incredibly awful.)   But the cringe factor and amateurish nature of nearly all Australian TV drama writing (who is to blame for this?  Where do Australian drama writers learn their craft?) gives me an assured feeling that all Australian recent attempts at political intrigue shows are as bad as ever.

Anyway, the other good thing about Occupied is that it should appeal to a wide variety of biases -

POSSIBLE TOO MUCH SPOILER FOLLOWS, READ AT YOUR OWN DISCRETION

the story is basically that a well meaning Green-ish Prime Minister with dubious actual political ability leads the country into a situation where it is virtually abandoned by the rest of Europe and America.   So you can hate the Greens and blame him, or blame the Russians for their duplicity, or the European Union for being more interested in gas than national sovereignty over gas and oil fields, or the Americans for suddenly becoming more interested in non-intervention and not stepping on Russian toes too much (shades of a Trump influence there).   Any viewer can watch it and find someone to blame in alignment with their pre-existing political biases.   How many shows about political intrigue manage to do that?   

It's well acted and well plotted - it has never really crossed any line into unbelievability.  (Now that I think back, the first episode is perhaps not as strong as later ones - it really does get better the more you watch it.)

And there is a second series (and a third coming it seems).

Not sure why it is not better known....