Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
During our interview a couple weeks ago, Walter Iuzzolino — the co-founder and curator of Walter Presents, a streaming service for foreign language dramas launching Stateside today — informed me of a Norwegian show called Young & Promising. Akin to sitcoms like quartet-led Girls and The Inbetweeners (the British send-up of teenage male bonding), Iuzzolino described the “fun and very realistic” main characters of Young & Promising (Unge Iovende in Norwegian) as “these sort of sexy, funky, sweet girls who are big losers: they want to act, they want to write, they want to be comedians, and it never quite works. But they have their exes, they have drunken sex, and they go back home to their parents.” Since we’re just a month away from the Girls series finale — and I’m predisposed to enjoying intricate female friendships among deeply-flawed 20-somethings — I checked it out on a recent snow day.
Until 20 minutes into the second episode, I thought, These girls definitely have their shit together more than our Girls. That’s when Alex Gjesdal (Alexandra Gjerpen) relieved herself on a lovely Oslo cobblestone street.
I’m strictly against public urination, but Alex’s was the coda to a frustrating series of career-related events. In her fourth attempt to gain entry into a prestigious acting academy, Alex not only reached the final round of auditions, but also convinced a National Theatre ensemble member to briefly run lines with her. Mid-practice, Alex receives a phone call: her headband-wearing boyfriend, Kimmo (Ole Christoffer Ertvaag) has been hospitalized; she dashes to his side, dumbstruck with fear. At the hospital, Kimmo is calm and content, resting his “twisted knee” on a cot. Lacking a bit of sensitivity, Alex explains that she wished she’d been told the extent of his injury before scrapping the sole line-reading session. “You wanna talk about being serious?” he asks. “I play handball in front of thousands of people every weekend. You read poems in a coffee shop in front of seven people, so.” Well, at least she’ll be paired with a supportive scene partner in her audition. Scratch that: the young man she’s asked to improvise with reaches for her butt, causing her to lurch out of character. Afterwards, most of Alex’s acting friends say the error was hers, but they take her out drinking and frolicking near a fountain as a distraction. And, oh yeah, she goes home to Kimmo, who actually has a damaged ligament and will be recovering on her couch for the next year.
Alex’s arc is one of three tracked on Young & Promising, a series that had a pair of six-episode seasons on the publicly-funded network NRK, beginning in 2015. The others belong to her former roommate, Elise Evinsen (Siri Seljeseth), and their friend Nenne Mørch (Gine Cornelia Pedersen). Since Seljeseth created the show, serves as a writer, and is the first of the trio we meet onscreen, its easy to construe her as another Hannah Horvath. Girls opens with a jolting parental confession, when Hannah learns that she’s been financially cut off. In the Norwegian pilot, Elise’s parents cop to something much more tawdry, what her mom calls “a special situation”: Elise’s father has impregnated another woman. Young & Promising does not lead with this, however, instead laying the groundwork for everything to come with a bit of winking self-deprecation. We’re introduced to Elise in Southern California of all places, where she’s in a plane at LAX, preparing for a 72-hour visit to her homeland so she can renew her visa (this obviously isn’t going to happen — for the plot’s sake, she needs to stay enmeshed with her family and friends). Elise cheers up her tearful seatmate (who is honeymooning solo) by revealing that she hasn’t interacted with her best friend, Anders (Jakob Oftebro) since sneaking out of his apartment months ago, after they slept together for the first time. Also, “I have a degree in acting, but it qualifies me to play Bob the Builder at a shopping mall,” a post she held for three years. Her actual dream job is stand-up comedian (she tells all her jokes in English).
The most Hannah-esque storyline actually belongs to Nenne, a catering staffer with author ambitions. Two men at a publishing start-up wants to include one chapter of her manuscript in an anthology, hailing it as a documentary of the female experience. “That’s like saying Moby Dick is bout a whale,” Nenne scoffs, refusing their offer in hopes of publishing her book elsewhere in its entirety. Publishing magnate Sissel Lundquist (Ingunn Øyen) pledges to do just that, yet this claim is made when Nenne finds Sissel drunk and applying lipgloss while sitting on a closed toilet, her underwear around her ankles (the initial episodes of Young & Promising don’t include sex or nudity — though it’s happens later, according to previews — and Øyen’s fearless bids to capture authenticity for the sake of art would doubtlessly earn Lena Dunham‘s approval). Whether the book deal carries over to Sissel’s sober life remains to be seen.
Young & Promising is engaging indeed; I found myself rooting for these characters and actually wanting to befriend them, unlike, at this point, the Girls protagonists. Perhaps this is due to their international novelty — I haven’t been reading non-stop think pieces about every choice made by Elise, Alex and Nenne. Also, this trio is ambitious without being entitled, and impressively wholesome even in self-indulgent moments.
