Sweden, Summer 1985; three women go on their own voyages of discovery.
This page opens with the synopsis supplied by the programme’s makers. Everything after it is our own.
Braxinge is famous for two things: a very large mental hospital, and a print works that prints pornography. The bandy team has been relegated. The papers only mention the town when jobs go or the school roll falls. So the committee has decided that what Braxinge needs is a festival, and the festival is going to be about hot dogs. Everything else in this series happens around the edges of that decision.
It's summer 1985 and the small Swedish town of Braxinge is going to stage a hot dog festival - a distraction from its main claims to fame: a huge mental hospital and printing pornography.
Barbro Westerlund likes to be in control… of the town party, and of her daughter ÅSA and granddaughter LENA. Åsa had Lena when she was only 17; the people of Braxinge still gossip about it. Åsa would like to find love, but without her mother's help - and preferably in Corfu. Lena dreams of a summer language school in Hastings, England.
The English course costs five thousand crowns, and at ground level the series is about getting hold of it. Åsa is a psychiatric nurse and a single mother who has taken every extra shift going, on a private arrangement with the old boss. The new boss arrives, the arrangement turns out to be against the rules, and the advance she has already promised her daughter is gone. She refuses to borrow from her parents. Lena and her friend take jobs at the print works. Money drives the plot, which a coming-of-age story does not often admit.
With music and fashion perfectly evocative of the mid-1980s, this bitter-sweet comedy-drama highlights that there's more to life than what you've perhaps been told… but you may have to go looking for it.
All three women are given a private life the others know nothing about, and that is what lifts it. Åsa is still being punished by the whole town for who she slept with at seventeen, and her closest ally turns out to be the gym teacher her mother tried to set her up with, who is gay and has his own reasons for wanting an alibi. Barbro, who is on every committee in Braxinge, is quietly writing erotic novellas for a magazine and being asked for more. Lena reads Graham Greene at people who have not opened the book and quotes Julius Caesar at the ones who bully her.
Known in Sweden as Sommaren 85, in Swedish with English subtitles, created by Emma Hamberg and Denize Karabuda, directed by Kristina Kjellin and Mikael Syrén, produced by Anette Brantin. One season.