Disaster epic suddenly the number one show on Netflix

The most-watched TV show on Netflix this Christmas is a Norwegian four-parter that recalls the best 90s disaster movies.

The new most-watched TV show on Netflix this Christmas is La Palma: A four-part Norwegian disaster epic about the looming threat of a volcano and tsunami.

At a resort on the island of La Palma, located in the Canary Islands, a Norwegian family arrives for their seventh Christmas at that hotel.

Fredrik (Anders Baasmo) likes the familiarity of it all, but his wife Jennifer (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal) wants to explore more than they have in the past. She’s been working out lately and looks so good that the new concierge hits on her as Fredrik asks for a rental car.

His stepdaughter, seventeen-year-old Sara (Alma Günther), is concerned about the distance growing between her mother and stepdad. Her little brother Tobias (Bernard Storm Lager), who is on the spectrum, wanders off from the pool and stands on a rock ledge as he notices sea turtles gathering in an unusual way.

Thank you, [man 4], for explaining it to me like this.

At the La Palma Geological Institute, Álvaro (Jorge de Juan), the institute’s director, sees news of a tour boat accident and grows concerned, but keeps those concerns to himself.

Since the last time the volcano on La Palma erupted, in 1949, a huge fault line has formed around the base; there is concerned that the next eruption will send piece of the mountain that’s as big as Manhattan tumbling into the ocean, touching off an unprecedentedly massive tsunami.

A young geologist, Marie Ekdal (Thea Sofie Loch Næss) sees that the instruments she put in a cave inside the mountain has stopped sending data, and she recruits Haukur (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson), a veteran geologist, to go to the cave to examine it. When they get there, they find they’re suddenly in imminent danger.

And the award for world’s most pointless subtitle goes to …

This all standard disaster movie (or in this case, four-part limited series) fare, but you have to give the writers of La Palma credit for giving us only a few characters to keep track of as the volcano erupts, people run for their lives, and the threat of the tsunami looms.

We have the Norwegian family, whose visit to the resort is a tradition, but not always a happy one. And we have folks like Marie and others at the institute, whose warnings fall on indifferent ears, and then use their expertise to save people when disaster strikes.

If you love big, dumb 90s disaster epics, La Palma is for you.

The show’s first episode sets up both of these stories, but does so in the context of the fact that a catastrophic eruption is an “not if, but when” scenario. The island has been living on borrowed time for 75 years, and climate change has only increased the chances of that eruption happening.

Sure, the personal stuff we get from the Norwegian family, as well as the fact that Marie’s brother is living with her while trying to stay sober, helps personalise most of the main characters while they navigate their way through this disaster, the show’s writers don’t dwell too much on that aspect. The family will either be drawn together by the disaster or completely splinter apart; Marie will face her own extinction while considering what kind of global implications an eruption may have.

It’s stuff we’ve seen in disaster films and series many times, but at least here, it’s not layered with melodrama, and just that makes the show more enjoyable than others in this genre.

La Palma is fairly typical disaster fare, but a relatively small main cast and a lack of melodrama make the show worth a watch, especially because the season is only 4 episodes and just over 3 hours of runtime.

This story originally appeared on Decider and is republished here with permission.

Originally published as Disaster epic suddenly the number one show on Netflix