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Netflix breaks new ground with streaming series
By MIKE HALE
The New York Times
Steven Van Zandt stars in
Steven Van Zandt stars in "Lillyhammer," an original series now available on Netflix.
The first thing you notice in “Lilyhammer” — before the presence of Steven Van Zandt, playing a less mannered version of his Mafia capo from “The Sopranos,” and before the sheep’s head lying in the road — is the big red Netflix logo.
It announces that this is a Netflix original series (its first) and that another front is being opened in streaming video’s war on television.
Netflix didn’t make “Lilyhammer,” a low-key black comedy starring Van Zandt, who played the stand-up guy Silvio Dante in “The Sopranos.” It was made by a Norwegian production company for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corp., which began showing it on Jan. 25.
But Netflix helped finance it, and this week all eight episodes of the first season have their U.S. premiere via streaming video. If you want to watch them on a television, the set will have to be connected to Netflix — but it won’t have to be connected to a cable company.
Pretty soon such things will go without saying. For now they’re still novel, and “Lilyhammer” is both a trailblazer and an interesting test case. It may be a Netflix property, but it’s a traditional TV show, and the episodes are about 50 minutes long, far beyond the norm for a Web series.
“Lilyhammer” is most distinctive simply for being a foreign show presented in its original form, with subtitles (though a good share of the dialogue, including nearly all of Van Zandt’s, is in English). That’s something virtually unheard of on mainstream U.S. television. The possibility of increased access to current foreign-language TV, beyond newscasts and Asian cartoons and soap operas, is a good reason to root for the streaming services.
So how is “Lilyhammer”? Odd mostly. It tries to combine elements of American mob stories and Scandinavian mysteries, seasoned with frequent overt references to “The Sopranos,” but the mixture is pretty flat in the first episode.
The jokey premise is that Van Zandt’s Frank Tagliano, having ratted out his boss, goes into witness protection and asks to be sent to Lillehammer, site of the 1994 Winter Olympics. He can’t pronounce its name, but he has a vision of the city as a Valhalla of cleanliness, rationality and order. The truth on the frozen ground is different, of course: grifters, perverts and punks slouching and grouching through life in a rules-bound nanny state.
With the new name Giovanni Hendriksen, he starts to set things straight in his no-nonsense manner, and there are some chuckles in the way Van Zandt and the filmmakers capitalize on gestures and expressions familiar from “The Sopranos.” (“Oh! Ohhhhh!”) But overall both the deadpan humor and the occasional bits of violence are tepid. It doesn’t feel as if the show’s makers had trouble settling on a tone; it feels as if they couldn’t muster the energy to come up with one.
Van Zandt is quite likable, but as an actor his resources are limited, and it’s asking a lot of him to carry a television-size series that shifts between tough-guy poses and culture-clash comedy, with middle-age romance thrown in. It doesn’t help that the abrupt shifts between English and Norwegian (which Giovanni apparently understands but hardly speaks) are unnatural and distracting.
Giovanni’s discovery of the sheep’s head in the road is amusing (and promising), but it’s undercut by a flat-footed, unnecessary explanation: “For a moment there I thought I was going to have to give Johnny Fontane a movie part.” We’ve seen “The Godfather” too. Funnier is a sequence in which Giovanni and his fledgling crew dispose of a dead wolf, weighing it down with rocks as if it were a wiseguy in the Meadowlands.
In Norway nearly a million people watched the first episode of “Lilyhammer”; proportionally, that’s about equal to the 58 million who watched the Giants beat the 49ers a few days earlier in the United States. However well the show does through Netflix, Van Zandt may be able to add another distinction to his resume alongside “Sopranos” star and Bruce Springsteen sideman: the David Hasselhoff of Scandinavia
By MIKE HALE
The New York Times
Steven Van Zandt stars in
Steven Van Zandt stars in "Lillyhammer," an original series now available on Netflix.
The first thing you notice in “Lilyhammer” — before the presence of Steven Van Zandt, playing a less mannered version of his Mafia capo from “The Sopranos,” and before the sheep’s head lying in the road — is the big red Netflix logo.
It announces that this is a Netflix original series (its first) and that another front is being opened in streaming video’s war on television.
Netflix didn’t make “Lilyhammer,” a low-key black comedy starring Van Zandt, who played the stand-up guy Silvio Dante in “The Sopranos.” It was made by a Norwegian production company for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corp., which began showing it on Jan. 25.
But Netflix helped finance it, and this week all eight episodes of the first season have their U.S. premiere via streaming video. If you want to watch them on a television, the set will have to be connected to Netflix — but it won’t have to be connected to a cable company.
Pretty soon such things will go without saying. For now they’re still novel, and “Lilyhammer” is both a trailblazer and an interesting test case. It may be a Netflix property, but it’s a traditional TV show, and the episodes are about 50 minutes long, far beyond the norm for a Web series.
“Lilyhammer” is most distinctive simply for being a foreign show presented in its original form, with subtitles (though a good share of the dialogue, including nearly all of Van Zandt’s, is in English). That’s something virtually unheard of on mainstream U.S. television. The possibility of increased access to current foreign-language TV, beyond newscasts and Asian cartoons and soap operas, is a good reason to root for the streaming services.
So how is “Lilyhammer”? Odd mostly. It tries to combine elements of American mob stories and Scandinavian mysteries, seasoned with frequent overt references to “The Sopranos,” but the mixture is pretty flat in the first episode.
The jokey premise is that Van Zandt’s Frank Tagliano, having ratted out his boss, goes into witness protection and asks to be sent to Lillehammer, site of the 1994 Winter Olympics. He can’t pronounce its name, but he has a vision of the city as a Valhalla of cleanliness, rationality and order. The truth on the frozen ground is different, of course: grifters, perverts and punks slouching and grouching through life in a rules-bound nanny state.
With the new name Giovanni Hendriksen, he starts to set things straight in his no-nonsense manner, and there are some chuckles in the way Van Zandt and the filmmakers capitalize on gestures and expressions familiar from “The Sopranos.” (“Oh! Ohhhhh!”) But overall both the deadpan humor and the occasional bits of violence are tepid. It doesn’t feel as if the show’s makers had trouble settling on a tone; it feels as if they couldn’t muster the energy to come up with one.
Van Zandt is quite likable, but as an actor his resources are limited, and it’s asking a lot of him to carry a television-size series that shifts between tough-guy poses and culture-clash comedy, with middle-age romance thrown in. It doesn’t help that the abrupt shifts between English and Norwegian (which Giovanni apparently understands but hardly speaks) are unnatural and distracting.
Giovanni’s discovery of the sheep’s head in the road is amusing (and promising), but it’s undercut by a flat-footed, unnecessary explanation: “For a moment there I thought I was going to have to give Johnny Fontane a movie part.” We’ve seen “The Godfather” too. Funnier is a sequence in which Giovanni and his fledgling crew dispose of a dead wolf, weighing it down with rocks as if it were a wiseguy in the Meadowlands.
In Norway nearly a million people watched the first episode of “Lilyhammer”; proportionally, that’s about equal to the 58 million who watched the Giants beat the 49ers a few days earlier in the United States. However well the show does through Netflix, Van Zandt may be able to add another distinction to his resume alongside “Sopranos” star and Bruce Springsteen sideman: the David Hasselhoff of Scandinavia
