In
Beartown, Hockey is everything. The small Swedish town’s hopes and destiny are tied to its hockey club’s success and failures. In comes Peter Andersson (Ulf Stenberg), a recent NHL retiree and Beartown native, who is tasked with turning the team around and hopefully the town’s fortunes with it. A horrific crime shakes the city’s foundation just as the junior hockey team starts rising through their league, calling into question the town’s toxic culture. The first scene of the first episode shows an unknown individual fleeing from an unknown rifle-holding pursuer. Shots ring out through the frozen landscape. What caused this chase is the mystery of the show and unfolds through Beartown s junior hockey team’s rise and fall.
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Beartown is dying. It s an industrial Swedish town where actual industry is on the decline and development has stalled or even reversed. Sometimes it feels as if the surrounding forest, thick with knobby spruce trees, is encroaching on the city, like nature has forgotten anyone lives there at all. But for Beartown (or Björnstad) residents, there remains a glimmer of hope for the town s future: its junior hockey league. Beartown, the new five-episode HBO limited series from Sweden, centers on the league s hopes for ascendency after former National Hockey League player Peter Andersson (Ulf Stenberg) returns to Beartown, his home town, after an injury cut his time playing professionally in the United States short. He s joined by his wife, Mira (Aliette Opheim) and their 15-year-old daughter, Maya (Miriam Ingrid).
Fredrik Backman s best-selling novel gets the small-screen treatment with this grim, underwritten adaptation.
HBO
Welcome to
Up Next, a column that gives you the rundown on the latest TV. This week, Valerie Ettenhofer reviews the Swedish adaptation of Fredrik Backman’s best-selling novel Beartown, which is coming to HBO.
Scandinavian crime dramas are famous for being bleak and gripping. HBO has given viewers some of the best TV that’s ever aired. A marriage between the two seems all but guaranteed to be a dark delight. Yet the Swedish import
Beartown (in Swedish:
Björnstad), based on the best-selling novel by