Thursday, 2 November 2017

Fortitude

On its launch in January 2015 you couldn’t move without seeing a billboard for Fortitude.  Huge out-of-home formats in train stations and by roadsides told everyone to stop what they were doing and to watch this massive show immediately.  There was a stellar cast.  Not just big names, but credible character actors who are in those shows and films that you like, and who did ever such a good performance in that thing where maybe they got some award nominations as well, probably.  Plus, there was snow in the background.  A show in the snow seemed like something a bit different, so what wasn’t to love?



Around the same time, I was lucky enough to meet the man at Sky who had commissioned Fortitude.  As part of my real job, I was at their HQ in Osterley (not worth the Tube journey in itself) for an immersion day and we were granted an audience with this very nice chap (which was worth the Tube journey).  Commissioners are often the most interesting people you can meet in media.  They have to predict and then cater to the desires of audiences, both telling us what we should want to watch and responding to what we actually want to watch.  For a drama like Fortitude, the gestation period can last years, but I remember being told that the script was like nothing he had seen before and like nothing on TV at the time, so he gave it the green light.

Now we are two series into Fortitude and, indeed, it is like nothing I have ever seen before.  In fact, after sitting through many hours of it, I still have no idea what it is like or, really, what it’s about either.  Is it science fiction or realistic?  Is it a murder mystery or is it a drama?  Is it a crime thriller or arthouse foreign nonsense?  Luckily, it’s all of these things, and most likely a few others as well.

I spent the first series imagining that Fortitude was an island near the Arctic, maybe like Svalbard.  With its governor and everyone speaking English, I thought it might be a British or US territory.  I think now it’s actually near Norway’s border with Russia, but it doesn’t really matter.  It’s snowy AF and the best thing about its place name is hearing all the cast pronouncing it in their wonderfully different accents.  Not the Americans or the Brits, but the various Scandinavians.  I’ve already talked of my love of a good Nordic accent in Vikings, but they don’t get to singsong For-ti-tude over and over again till it sounds ridiculously entertaining.

That aside, there are things about the show that don’t quite work.  Given the environment, action scenes do tend to end with people running in the snow.  But people can’t run very fast in snow.  Especially if they are wrapped up in big coats.  And the big coats make the characters hard to recognise.  Therefore, I find it hard to be excited by the snow chases, but it doesn’t matter, as I don’t know who the people are anyway.  The cast is pretty big – it’s a whole town.  If you don’t cotton on to names quickly, or remember everything you’ve seen, then abandon hope now.  Quite a few of them die, so series two regenerates with new people who you’ve never heard of and whose origins aren’t really explained.  The mysteries are also complex, mostly rooting back to a decomposing mammoth carcass in the permafrost.  And, you know, wasps.  If advanced biology, zoology and archaeology aren’t your idea of entertainment then you should probably be keeping up with a Kardashian instead.  However, if the gore of shows like Fear The Walking Dead isn’t enough, then Fortitude has many gruesome treats for you.  It’s the first show where I’ve had to mute the sound to spare myself the grotesque audio of some unnecessary surgery.

But yes, get drawn in by the stellar cast (until their characters die), enjoy the breath-taking snowscapes (even though they tone down any action chases as people are worried about slipping over) and stay for the twists and turns (because it doesn’t really matter if you have no idea what’s going on).  At no point will you be more entertained than when you hear a Scandinavian cry out the place name For-ti-tude…


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