With its small population of only 5.6 million inhabitants, its public service broadcasting dominance, and no recent history of world colonization or immigration, the near global success of Denmark’s television industry over the last seven years is as unprecedented as it is impressive. Previous work on transnational media distribution and reception has repeatedly shown that non-Anglophone content rarely exports outside its geo-linguistic region due to the perception that audiences in other regions would be too far removed culturally and linguistically. Similarly, theories on the consumption of audio-visual content have tended to neglect transnational, ‘non-resident’ viewing and, instead, emphasised the importance of geo-linguistic, national or ‘resident’ viewing. How, then, do we begin to account for the success of Danish language drama around the world? Through an analysis of the ratings of Danish series in Australia and interviews with Australian audiences of Danish TV drama, this paper will start to answer this question.
