A country where everyone live in big houses or mansions, drives Mercedes or Audis and every adult is either an architect, diplomat, psychiatrist or entrepenour. Seemingly there is no working class or poor in Denmark.
'Families Like Ours' tries to show what happens to those "ordinary" danes, and how they act and react, facing a shutdown because of rising sea levels.
The build-up is really slow. First example of "something is not right here" is when the architect notices that the water level in his toilet has risen (I kid you not). Then there's the usual "nobody panic" message from the primeminister on television (causing everyone to panic more or less of course). Immediately after we're off to a whole string of sequences and episodes of every man (or woman or family) for themselves. But they are not fighting for survival because the threat isn't imminent. It's more a capitalist nightmare of "who will lose most of their money" before time runs out? And who will stick together? Each chasing their own version of safety, Most behaving unbelievably selfish.
The acting is okay (Vinterberg knows how to direct his cast), but the script could use a lot more fine-tuning. Trying to pick up how teens in Denmark speak, they just inserted words like "sick" here and there in their dialouge for example. There are also servere pacing issues throughout and I really think this would have been a better show if it was made as a two-hour movie instead. Actually some episodes are actually kind of boring.
Maybe if they pick it up in US? Their adaption could be called "Families like ours in 90210"
