Glocal perspectives on Danish television series: Contemporary threats and opportunities for public service drama production

Two interwoven and increasing tendencies characterise the development of Danish television drama during the past two decades. On the one hand, the financial composition and the narrative strategies of the dramas have become explicitly transnational. On the other hand, local municipal administrations and local funding opportunities have shown a growing attention towards the local impact of co-funding television drama productions. As a result, the financial composition of television drama funding has become exceedingly complex. One way to describe contemporary television drama funding models is by way of Roland Robertson’s notion of ‘glocalisation’. Back to back, contemporary television funding schemes comprise of local and transnational institutions of various kinds going from small local industrial partners to larger supranational framework programmes. In order to analyse the financial complexity of commercial public service drama, I will give short representative analysis of what was dubbed ‘the TV war’: the broadcast of the commercial PSB drama Greyzone (TV 2 2018-) and the ‘traditional’ PSB drama Liberty (DR 2018).