Advokaterna, a new legal thriller series from Swedish authors and screenwriters Jens Albinus, Hans Rosenfeldt, and Michael Hjorth, is in the works.
It takes one to know one. And to create a TV series about one. A lawyer, that is.
Which is what Swedish criminal defense attorney Jens Lapidus has done with Advokaterna (Lawyers), the first big-budget legal thriller to be produced in Sweden.
Hopefully, you’ve never needed Lapidus’ professional services. Rather, you might know him as the author of the “Stockholm Noir” (aka “Snappa Cash”) trilogy of books, which were adapted into the “Easy Money” film series (Easy Money, Easy Money: Hard to Kill, and Easy Money: Life Deluxe), which launched the international film careers of Joel Kinnaman (Johan Falk), Matias Varela (Arne Dahl), and Fares Fares (Maria Wern).
Now Lapidus is getting into television.
In an interview with Swedish newspaper Göteborgs-Posten, Lapidus stated:
“TV media offers opportunities to tell stories in a different way, while the format is actually reminiscent of literature.”
He later noted HBO and its television series, saying the premium cable channel is particularly helpful in bringing quality dramas to the small screen, as “authors do not need to adapt their script and create tiresome cliffhangers before each commercial break.”
For Advokaterna Lapidus has collaborated with Hans Rosenfeldt, creator of the international hit crime drama series The Bridge and the new UK drama Marcella, and Michael Hjorth, creator of the fabulous mystery series The Fjällbacka Murders.
Rosenfeldt and Hjorth are also the co-authors of the novels Dark Secrets and the recently-published The Man Who Watched Women. These were adapted into the Rolf Lassgård movies Sebastian Bergman: The Cursed One and Sebastian Bergman: Dark Secrets, respectively. (It’s a bit confusing, but Dark Secrets, the movie, is based on The Man Who Watched Woman, not the Dark Secrets book. Go figure.)
Moving on.
Advokaterna revolves around Frank, a young lawyer who is facing the biggest case of his career so far, when he discovers the dark parallels between his own family and the most notorious of Stockholm’s criminal gangs.
Series producer Jon Nohrstedt (Easy Money) also shared in the interview that while Advokaterna was originally developed as a project with Swedish broadcast network TV 4, he is currently in negotiations with a number of other channels. Apparently, there is a lot of international interest for the series, as well, so fingers crossed it makes it way across the fjords to the US and UK.
The pilot and second episode of the “exciting, modern” ten-part drama are mapped out already, as is the rest of the show’s storyline, but neither the lead nor supporting actors have been cast yet. Filming is slated to start in 2016, and if production goes as planned, Advokaterna will premiere locally in the fall of 2017.
Svensk Filmindustri (SF) (A Darker Sky) is developing Advokaterna with Tre Vänner Produktion AB (The Fjällbacka Murders), the production company SF purchased in 2013.
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