Burden of Justice is already a hit. More than a million Swedes — a tenth of the total population — caught the first episode of the legal drama, about a pack of ethically-challenged defense lawyers at the elite Stockholm firm Mattson & Moradi, on Swedish public broadcaster SVT.
The show has also wowed audiences at the international TV festival Series Mania, where it screened this week as part of the International Panorama program.
For a global audience that’s come to associate Nordic TV with an endless parade of noir-ish procedurals, Burden of Justice flips the script, turning the justice system itself into the crime scene. There’s no body in the field. No icy detective in a cozy knit sweater. The attorneys at Mattson & Moradi dress in Gordon Gekko power suits. They make their money searching for legal loopholes to spring their wealthy clients.
Managing partner Kalle (Björn Bengtsson) can spin a persuasive line about every citizen’s right to a defense, but most of his team have long since abandoned the moral high ground for legal expediency — and the lure of the four-figure billable hour. New partner Sasha (Arvin Kananian) finds a way, despite Sweden‘s strict consent laws, to get a rich rapist off the hook. The ambitious Oscar (Kit Walker Johansson), hoping to land a big drug dealer client, agrees to frame a juvenile for murder.
Burden of Justice was created by Jens Lapidus, a criminal defense attorney turned writer and showrunner, best known for his crime novel Snabba Cash (Easy Money), adapted as a film trilogy starring Joel Kinnaman and later reworked by Lapidus himself into a two-season Netflix series. Like that series, and Lapidus’ 2020 crime drama Top Dog, set amid Sweden’s Serbian mafia, Burden of Justice lives in a gray world of ethical compromise.
“The average person thinks the justice system is about looking for the truth, right? With lawyers and judges in sort of the hero role, searching for justice,” says Frans Wiklund, the series head writer. “But if you look deeper you find, for defense attorneys, it’s about saving your client, about finding the cracks in the system.”
Despite its dramatic flourishes, Burden of Justice is grounded in deep research.
“We spent a lot, a lot of time talking to lawyers, to prosecutors, to judges, to people who committed crimes, people who were victims of crimes,” says series director and co-writer Lisa Linnertorp.
The team had lawyers on set to advise the actors and tweak dialogue, particularly for the courtroom scenes.
“There was one scene, where I have a three-page monologue, a huge scene I worked on a lot,” says Tiril Wishman, who plays junior associate Tilde. “During the shoot, the lawyer was like: ‘no, change this, move this to there, shift it all around,’ it made my head spin. All to make it as realistic as possible.”
The realism, and the rawness, of Burden of Justice, sets it apart from most Swedish TV fare, which can often be polished and tasteful to a fault. Politically incorrect and in-your-face, with plenty of dark humor accentuating the drama, the show resembles the more cutting-edge TV — think Borgen or Rita — made by Sweden’s ruder neighbor Denmark.
“The storytelling and the tonality, with its rawness, its humor, definitely has a Danish aspect to it,” says Arvin Kananian. “It’s a matter of taste, and it’s a weird thing to say when you’re a part of it, but for me this is the best series to come out of our territory since I started watching TV.”
Swedish audiences appear to agree. With two episodes of season one still to air, SVT has greenlit a second season. A third season is in development. DR Sales, the Danish outfit which sold Borgen and Rita worldwide, is handling international rights. Their bet is that a global market sated with Nordic Noir will be hungry for a less conventional Scandi drama, one that trade the murder mysteries for a colder premise: The moral rot inside the courtroom.
