Women take the lead in Nordic noir: Borgen, The Bridge, The Killing

COOL Scandinavia is the latest hot spot when it comes to long-form television drama.

Borgen

WHERE once cinema was the province of directors, it's now television, paradoxically a collaborative medium, but which celebrates the creative visions of individual auteurs. It has changed our viewing habits too: cultural immersion no longer means going to a converted warehouse to watch a group of actors naked to their G-strings inspecting the mouths of audience members, but sinking into a DVD box set for a weekend of spiritual grace and enlightenment.

But golden age TV - ambitious, adventurous and shapeshifting - is often hard to find. Sometimes shows creep up on you, spread by whispered word of mouth by those who search out cult offerings that are destined to become "important TV".

Borgen, a Danish drama about the fight for political power and its consequence, is a good example. Created by Adam Price, it stars the luminous Sidse Babett Knudsen as Birgitte Nyborg, Denmark's first female prime minister. It started as a word-of-mouth show, one fans felt we had personally discovered, that we owned, that we thought of as ours alone, a personal and addictive secret pleasure.

The first season revolved around Nyborg's unexpected rise to power, following her progression from smiling ingenue and loving wife and mother to steely ruler. We saw how Nyborg's personal life started to disintegrate at the same time as her political success was applauded.

The second season picked up this week, 11 months after the debut series, with a thinner Nyborg still fighting battles in government and at home. She's struggling to come to terms with her recent divorce from Phillip (Mikael Birkkjaer), the lovely man who laughed at everything. When the laughs stopped coming in episode eight, and that pretty young student appeared at inappropriate times, we knew the writing was on the wall.

International diplomacy plays a bigger part in the new season - and it's remarkable how similar the political preoccupations of Denmark seem to be to our own - but Nyborg also has to deal with Phillip's new girlfriend Cecilie (Mille Dinesen) and the deepening of their relationship. The opening scenes of the new season were set propitiously in a code-red military zone in Afghanistan where Nyborg visited Danish soldiers: she may be able to address her soldiers as a wartime leader but she is facing all the complications of divorce back home.

Her crafty, emotionally damaged spin doctor Kasper Juul (Pilou Asbaek) also returns, with a new girlfriend, but already ominous clouds are gathering over their relationship. Ambitious Katrine Fonsmark (Birgitte Hjort Sorensen) is back too, having seemingly forsaken her high journalistic ideals and joined the scurrilous tabloid Ekspres, which delights in preying on politicians.

Borgen is not to be missed for its intelligence, narrative complexity and the star power of the lead actress. Knudsen's fans talk about her and the show with near religious zeal. As they did about Sofia Helin's Saga Noren in The Bridge, with her Porsche, leather trousers and endearing lack of social graces, and constant, almost comically breathtaking detachment. We spent hours of our lives waiting for her to laugh. And, of course, The Killing's Sarah Lund too, played by the magnetic Sofie Grabol in those faded jeans, flat black boots and the now famous snowflake-patterned jumpers. We spent even more hours with Lund just waiting for her to smile and seem happy.

These are the stars of what's become known as Nordic noir, a genre characterised by its fascinating but flawed mature female leads, each personifying the lonely, fatigued and painfully heroic character once only the province of men. Borgen, while not a crime drama, is just as compelling, wrenching incisive, gut-wrenching and spellbinding, and astutely engineered by creator Price.

Knudsen, who spoke in Sydney recently at an Scandinavian-styled event organised as part of the Sydney Opera House 40th anniversary celebrations, calls the Danish dramas "shows that you live in for days".

And she's right about Borgen, not so much because of the suspense, intrigue and mystery but because it asks such tough questions of its followers as much as it does of its characters. What is the cost on parenthood of professional ambition? Can family really provide strength in times of adversity? Can we be good parents and good partners as well as good at our jobs? Can decency ever prevail in politics? If this is the age of availability, what demands does this place on us outside of work? And what is happiness?

Knudsen is terrific, one of the most accomplished and charismatic actors around. She carries this series, appearing in practically every scene, verbally nimble and physically elegant but with a barely subdued feistiness hovering just beneath her tight crinkly-nosed smile. Interestingly, she said in a recent interview with Le Monde that she learned how politicians atrophy by watching Tony Blair.

BORGEN is a great example of the old gag that "staying in is the new going out" and so is The Walking Dead, the zombie series that started as a cult for genre nerds and is now said to be the most watched show on TV.

I've only picked it up in the fourth season, now running on Foxtel's FX; it also started here as a talked-about show, but unlike Borgen it was seemingly a horrible thing that few people had actually seen and that, they hinted, if you did see it, you might not survive the experience. It had a marvellously attractive, clandestine feel to it but I didn't succumb to its seemingly disreputable charms at that point.

If you didn't either and have managed to avoid it to your cultural impoverishment, SBS has picked up rights to the first two seasons, so you can see how this phenomenon started.

The first episode, Days Gone By, is directed by series creator, Oscar-nominated writer-director Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption). The series is adapted from the graphic comic book series by writer Robert Kirkman, who is also executive producer. And it is stunning, already a classic TV pilot, a wonderful orchestration of special effects, stunt work and fluid camera skills, a mesmerising piece of filmmaking of the old school, classically paced and shot on grainy 16mm.

Darabont designs the episode around Andrew Lincoln's Sheriff Grimes, who of course becomes the show's hero. There's just the cop, his trusty old-fashioned six-inch stainless steel .357 magnum Colt Python, and hordes of reanimated corpses surrounding him as he begins his quest to find his wife and son in a dystopian southern gothic landscape.

Grimes's agonised exploration of the abandoned blood-spattered hospital in which he wakes up is one of the purest expressions of TV's movement toward a cinematic emphasis on visceral atmospheric and determinedly visual storytelling, words handmaiden to the images. Zombie aficionados will tell you it's up there alongside George A. Romero's 1968 Night of the Living Dead and Sam Rami's blood-soaked The Evil Dead series, and the gruesome efforts of Italian undead maestro Lucio Fulci in films such as The Beyond (a huge influence on Quentin Tarentino.)

Certainly, Days Gone By, with its echoes of Cormac McCarthy, Bram Stoker and Stephen King, and working across genres from the post-apocalyptic to the western, is an astonishing start to a series that's really a parable of the economic anxiety and moral dread many of us now face. "Are we all not teetering on the brink of despair or riding the knife's edge between despair and joy, between hopelessness and hopefulness, between optimism and pessimism, between ugliness and beauty," Darabont said of his creation. "I really think there's this weird death thing happening in the human consciousness at the moment, and I think that's why zombies have become so fascinating to so many people."

Maybe, as he also suggests, that defines all drama; and all art.

The Walking Dead, Tuesday, 9.30pm, SBS Two.

Borgen, Wednesday, 9.30pm, SBS One.