You know things are bleak when every mainstream comedy derives its humour from just how fucked up it is to be young today. Girls, Broad City, Search Party, Insecure, Fleabag, Love, This Country, You’re The Worst… the list of on-screen women in their 20s “just doing their best to figure it all out” is endless.
Over on Channel 4 tonight, a new overgrown child of the genre debuts, albeit one with a slight difference. Young and Promising (or Unge Lovende) makes its way to mainstream UK TV from Norway’s NRK (the channel that brought us Skam, the best teen drama of the decade) as part of All 4’s Walter Presents programme, which offers a chance to experience shows from around the globe. It’s Norwegian, subtitled, gently funny and very honest.
Young and Promising is written by its lead actress, Siri Seljeseth, who plays Elise, an aspiring comedian based in LA who returns home to Oslo to renew her tourist visa. The show also follows her two best friends (played by Seljeseth’s real friends from the Nordic Institute of Stage and Studio): Nenne (Gine Cornelia Pedersen), a waitress and unpublished fiction writer, and Alex (Alexandra Gjerpen), who is at the crucial stages of auditions for the Norwegian National Academy of Theatre for the fourth year in a row.
It’s Elise whom we see the most of in tonight’s opening double-bill, which follows her from LA to the US Embassy in Oslo as she tries to get back to California. In Norway, it watches her struggle to handle a relationship she had left hanging, with her ruggedly handsome best friend Anders, whom she slept with the night before she first left for LA. It’s her home life, however, that’s most intriguing: her domineering father has cheated on her nervous, psychoanalytic mother and is having a baby with another woman. Who? “I don’t think that is relevant in this situation,” he insists. “This won’t affect you in a greater extent.”
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Meanwhile, Nenne is rejecting male publishers who fetishise her work as a new cool feminist voice. She uses her waitressing job to her advantage, assisting a senior publisher suffering from alcohol-induced vomiting and diarrhea in order to call in a favour later. But it’s Alex who has the stand out plotline, with some of the most complex and moving scenes of the show. She is simultaneously the most ambitious and most disillusioned character, played at breaking point by Gjerpen. When, in a key audition, her male scene partner suddenly forces his hand between her thighs, she snaps, and spends the rest of the episode lurching between hot tears of guilt over losing the scene, and painful conversations with peers about “being in character”.
Young and Promising has drawn countless comparisons to Girls, as any new show about mid-20s creative women does, but it’s friendlier, less cinematic and more down to earth than much of that series. The laughs don’t hit as hard, but its lead characters are fundamentally much more likeable. If you’re a struggling millennial comedy addict, or searching for something to fill the Norwegian hole Skam left in your life, Young and Promising is for you.
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