Grade: B/B+
Entire family: No
2014, 220 min. (10 episodes), Color
Not Rated (would be PG)
Entertainment One
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Featured audio: Swedish and English Dolby Digital 5.1 (English subtitles)
Bonus features: N/A
Amazon link
Welcome to Sweden is a Swedish situation comedy in English and Swedish (with English subtitles) that aired simultaneously on The Comedy Network in Canada and on NBC in the United States last year. Executive produced by comedian Amy Poehler (Saturday Night Live, Parks and Recreation), it stars her brother, Greg, as a New York accountant to celebrities who makes a ton of money but realizes that what he really wants is to be Swedish . . . to move to Sweden to live with his serious new Swedish girlfriend.
In a TV series that’s built around culture (and personality) clashes, because of his honesty poor Bruce (Poehler) gets into almost as much inadvertent trouble as Larry David does in Curb Your Enthusiasm—except that unlike David, he’s actually a nice, thoughtful guy. Bruce was raised in a small midwestern town, though he isn’t nearly as conservative or religious as his parents. His philosophy is the kind of laid-back “things will work out” (i.e., fix themselves) attitude more common to California than New York. So when he meets Emma (Josephine Bornebusch) and they hit it off, he decides to quit his lucrative job and follow her to Sweden, where she returns to be with family and to work in a bank.
For a sitcom, Welcome to Sweden has a real low-key indie vibe to it, but once Greg gets off the plane in Stockholm and moves in with Emma and her family, it also starts to feel like a milder, more sophisticated, tongue-in-cheek version of Meet the Parents. Viveka (Lena Olin) is the vivacious mom who feels herself getting older and wants to live a second-chance life through her daughter, but the fact that she married a much older man (Claes Mansson as Birger) who’s now less vital is an annoying reminder of how much she herself has aged. A former sea captain, Birger is as tall as Bruce is short, quiet and reserved as Bruce is prone to babble nervously. And those contrasts too add fuel to the comic fire. So does Emma’s slacker brother Gustaf (Christopher Wagelin) and a host of minor characters with single quirks or identifiers. More
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