Tjockare an vatten

Swedish series are related to Danish as netball to basketball. Like Pepsi to Coca-Cola and Ja Rule to Nas. Nice try, but often not quite. I think then. Nine times out of ten it fails in good intentions. Jordskott, Real Humans, Blue Eyes. They all did their best, but they never reached the level of the Southern neighbors. Tjockare Än Vatten also goes all out, but clearly draws the short straw in the removal competition with the comparable Danish family drama Arvingerne. Shouldn't you watch it at all? No, it is possible. Just adjust your expectations a little in advance. Is better for everyone. After the death of mother Anne-Lisa, her family pension is left in the hands of the children. Logical, you might think, but nothing could be further from the truth. Oskar, who ran the toko together with his mother for years, Lasse and Jonna will only officially receive the tent when they manage to run a profitable summer together. If that doesn't work, they can write Pension Waldemar on their stomach. Or as they say in Sweden: Det är fina fitta. “But that's not a problem at all, is it?” I hear you think. Well, if the three have not had proper contact with each other for years and seem to find their own troubles more important than the happiness of their siblings. As said, Tjockare Än Vatten is quite okay to watch, but it is not a high flyer. It wants too much. The strength of many Danish series is that they take a whole season to unravel one big surface simmering secret piece by piece. Yummy. However, the makers of Tjockare Än Vatten have glued a minefield of secrets together and every episode seems to have a corpse from the closet. It therefore feels a bit forced and is actually just too much. Too much and too predictable. It lacks subtlety. After two episodes you already know exactly what you are getting. A great secret that keeps a family in a wooden grip for years; the brotherly dispute between a casual brother and a slightly jealous brother with an exaggerated sense of responsibility and an inferiority complex; a secret love between two people who can never be together and so on. It seems as if the makers have taken the "what-makes-a-good-story" manual and tried to stuff everything, but also everything, into this series. They apparently overlooked the Less Is More chapter.

Very fine series. I had a great time with the atmosphere, people, environment.