Game of Thrones may be about to take a final bow, but fans of the television series need not despair — Game of Trolls is coming.
A madcap new fantasy show call Magnus featuring the lumbering fairytale monsters is the talk of the Canneseries festival in the French Riviera resort, where the world’s top TV market MIPTV is also being held.
Funnier than anything in the Seven Kingdoms, it has been described as a hilarious fantasy mix of a Scandi noir cop show and Inspector Clouseau, with elements of Inspector Gadget and the deadpan surrealism of Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki thrown in for good measure.
Its creator, actor Vidar Magnussen, the brains behind the Mind Phallus spoofs of the British series Sherlock, told AFP that he has been “blown away” by the reaction to the series, already a huge hit in his homeland.
His Sherlock send-ups went viral in 2014 when one of the series’ stars Amanda Abbington shared them on social media.
They played on supposed homoerotic tensions between the famed fictional British detective played by Benedict Cumberbatch and his trusty sidekick Watson, played by her then-husband, Martin Freeman.
Norwegian state broadcaster NRK was so impressed it gave Magnussen “three and a half years to let my imagination run wild.”
Wacky twist on Nordic noir
The result is a take off of cult Nordic crime dramas like The Bridge, Wallander or The Killing with a wacky supernatural twist.
Even though its eponymous hero Magnus is the failed inventor and the worst detective in a small snow-bound Norwegian country town, Magnussen insisted that the show “doesn’t set out to bully or mock anyone.”
Yet the writer, who plays the bungling policeman himself, is not afraid to have fun with Scandinavian stereotypes.
“I feel that Nordic noir has done it’s time,” he said, even as he admitted that his show had borrowed some of their dark edges.
“The challenge was to do very silly comedy and yet ground in something quite real and hard that would have leave people wanting to know more,” he told AFP in Cannes, where the show had its international premiere.