Among my favorite long form TV series (Top of the Lake, Breaking Bad, Legacy, A Place to Call Home, Last Tango in Halifax, etc) is Borgen, a Danish show about a female Prime Minister and her struggles over several years and against multiple adversaries.

Now I’d add Herrens Veje, as Netflix bills it, though it also goes by Ride Upon the Storm.
This is also by Adam Price, the creator of Borgen.

It is about a family with Lutheran priests in it for the last 250 years. The current patriarch and his two troubled sons form the crux of the show, with vital peripheral characters thrown in.
When I’ve been asked over the years to name films that deal with religious themes intelligently I find the list petering out after several Bergman titles and some of Scorsese. Now there is this series. Some will find anything that tackles faith, doubt, sin, betrayal, redemption, guilt, spiritual visions, and family drama over the top no matter what. Better to deal with bad guys and fallible cops. But Price tackles these themes with an honesty and detachment that does not invite us to believe in anything beyond our own power to be engaged by complex, soul-wrenching situations. There are no apologies and those who speak for the church, the Danish National Church in this case, are just as flawed as those whose doubts run deep.
It’s all in the particulars and this show has them in spades.

The use of close ups is particularly compelling. These are all faces that seem to suppress as much emotion as they express. The characters are tightly wound with desires, fears, guilts and longings and only a fraction of it gets openly expressed. It gives the scenes an enormous sense of tension and the whole series a great deal of suspense, even though there is no ticking time bomb or a serial killer on the loose or any of the other usual suspects.

I’m finding it a more thought provoking show than just about anything I’ve seen in the last few years. I hope you do too, or, if not, I hope you’ll let me know why not.