In general, what the above criteria mean is that we have a habitual preference for European TV. Movies are kind of a different proposition, because some small percentage of American movies, in our senior minds, are emotionally bearable and have entertainment value. But for spur-of-the-moment weeknight TV choices, we're much more likely to turn to European TV. Often this means British or other Western European whodunnit murder mysteries, with hackneyed plots that are relaxing enough, and with quirky personalities that seem more or less believable and interesting to watch. And occasionally we'll run across a gem that actually doesn't have any murders and still entertains us.

 

Enter the subtitled Danish series, “Seaside Hotel.” All 9 seasons of it, with at least 6 episodes per season. The premise is a summer resort hotel near Skagen, at the northernmost tip of a Danish peninsula extending into the North Sea. The social dynamic is provided by a small group of families who return summer after summer. They are an eclectic mix of upper middle-class and relatively wealthy Danes, who run the gamut from a heartless capitalist businessman with no apparent moral structure, to a highly placed civil service bureaucrat with a finely developed progressive Liberal sensibility. Much of the day-to-day focus of the series centers on the maids & cooks. But there's also the mostly closet gay couple, some kids to watch grow up from season to season, sexual dalliances here and there, a very comically vane and childish middle-age actor, and others … most of whom are stereotypically eccentric in one way or another.

 

We started watching Seaside Hotel months ago, and found it to be, as referenced above, a relaxing and enjoyable show to watch from time to time when we wanted something with minimal stress. It was our go-to TV tranquilizer, if you will, and very dependable, with some episodes better than other, but none of them bad. Just enough tension to makes the show & season plots work very well, without any hold-your-breath moments waiting for the axe to fall. So we'd watch something more stressful for an hour, then click over to Seaside Hotel to decompress. It never failed in that respect. So that while it's extremely rare for me to watch five whole seasons of something and not get bored, this one worked.

 

Notably, though, in the sixth season, which we're four or five episodes into, it became more acutely engaging. Still not overly stressful, but more engaging.

 

The increasing engagement is because of the background premise of the show. Because with very rare momentary exceptions the movie set is limited to the hotel or on the beach. But the historical context is that the first episode takes place in 1929, starting in early summer, with the Great Depression on the horizon. Only one character, the conscientious bureaucrat, is even aware of the coming economic turmoil. Nobody will listen to him as he warns about the coming economic storm, and the antics of the guests and their periodic moments of family strife take center stage. In the end, nobody among this group of elites who have the resources to spend all summer on the beach appear to be dramatically affected. Still, the money crunch and its effect on finances figures heavily in the plotline, and there's a nicely done, very credible backstage view of the economic worries that characterized life for the upper middle-class and wealthy of that period. In the last few episode, the bureaucrat's worry shifts toward the rise of fascism in Germany.

 

After four seasons representing four continuous years on the beach, the show does a fast-forward, jumping six years into the future, up to 1938. And now the background has solidly shifted from the Depression to the rise of Hitler in neighboring Germany. And STILL nobody but the bureaucrat is really conscious of the threat. Or so it seems at least, until the matured daughter of one of the guests returns after being out of the picture for several seasons. Prior to her disappearance years earlier, she had been a nervous and intellectually precocious child. She returns as a nervous, or at least reserved, intellectually developed young woman, who like the bureaucrat is keenly aware of the brutalities going on in the country next-door.

 

And so it goes, as the threat of war grows, with international saber rattling going on and news that England is preparing for war, that Paris is very nervous about the possibility of invasion, and the appearance of Jewish refugees in Denmark … which along with Sweden and the other countries is arresting and returning them to Germany.

 

Which leads to the not-unexpected beginning of WWII … which started with the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, which happens the day before the guests at the Seaside Hotel are due to leave for the year.  Which in turn leads to the reason I'm writing this review of the show. Because I am profoundly impressed, and moved, by how the show handles and portrays the lead-up to the war. It seems genuinely authentic the way that people go about their lives, tend to their family economies, their sexual encounters, their tensions with relatives, and quite simply put the growing international tensions out of their mind. I'm certain that's exactly the way it happened, that most people, even very smart people, refused to think about the onrushing dangers and cataclysmic events that are about to happen … despite the warnings and obvious fears of the bureaucrat and the increasingly less mousy intellectual daughter.

 

Even while maintaining a relatively relaxing comic affect, the buildup to the war is wonderfully done, with a very light but very powerful touch for contemporary audiences who, unlike the characters in the story, know how horrid and bloody and destructive the coming years will be.

 

More to the point for Americans in this moment, there's an eerie similarity to what's going on in our own current period of rising fascism, with its pealing alarm bells of violent fanaticism in our own country. The denial of almost all of the characters in in the series is astonishingly like the denial of Americans now, who steadfastly refuse to countenance the wasting of the American Dream, the crash of civility, the undermining of expertise and competence, and the general idea that the United States is basically a good and benevolent country that, despite heavy-handed blunders it has committed at home and around the world, has a good heart and charitable ideals.

 

Seaside Hotel is without a doubt the most believable, not to mention entertaining, portrayal I've ever seen of how Europe blithely drifted into the Armageddon of WWII. Laughing and courting and celebrating and drinking champagne right up until the bombs started falling and blood started flowing.

 

So … to the extent that this is a movie review, I award this series maybe 8 stars as light entertainment for viewers who are as put off by a bomb a minute movies as we are. But as an articulation of the dangers of complaisance as reality deteriorates around us, I give it a very solid 10 stars. Quite simply as good as it gets, a velvet gloved slap in the face to remind us of the need to pay attention to the world beyond our family issues, our next business deal, and our personal neuroticisms.