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Working the Writers’ Room: The Context, the Creative Space and the Collaborations of Danish Television Series Borgen
Abstract
Writers are where it all starts . That is how Head of DR Fiction at the Danish Broadcasting Corporation DR (formerly Danmarks Radio), Nadia Kløvedal Reich, explains the DR approach to producing quality television drama (cited in Pham, 2012). Since the late 1990s, the strategy of DR’s in-house drama production unit, DR Fiction, has been to focus on original ideas of writers based on the concept of ‘one vision’. The notion is that one person needs to feel ownership and have an overall vision for a project in order to create successful series like Forbrydelsen/The Killing (2007–2012) or Borgen (2010–2013). In the DR production framework, this person is singled out as the head writer, but he or she normally works closely with other writers as well as the in-house producers of DR Fiction. It is a highly collaborative process, and several series in the DR framework are based on the use of writers’ rooms for producing quality drama series. 1 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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“Media industry processes are labelled by an understanding of industry operations as modes of authorship and by varying senses of ownership across multiple micro and macro perspectives (Freeman, 2016: 65 cited in Redvall, 2021;also Redvall, 2014: 232-233).”
From Is prompt engineering the future of screenwriting? Views of professional screenwriters and commissioners about the impact of AI technologies on their profession (2025) · cites this paper as Redvall, 2014
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Research works printed but not linked: 24
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Vainikka, E., Soronen, A., & Kallio, S.-M. (2025) · Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies · doi:10.1177/17496020241269277 · Cited by 9
Metadata
- Authors
- Redvall, E. N.
- Affiliations
- University of Copenhagen (DK)
- Corresponding author
- Redvall, Eva Novrup
- ORCID
- Redvall, Eva Novrup
- Venue
- Screenwriters and Screenwriting
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan UK
- Published
- 2014
- Pages
- 223-237
- OpenAlex
- W2486829431
- Cited by
- 2
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2021: 1 · 2016: 1
- FWCI
- 1.02
- Type
- book chapter
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks (publishedVersion)
- Research at the University of Copenhagen (University of Copenhagen) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Communication › Media and Digital Communication
- Social Sciences › Communication › News Media Framing and Political Communication
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Visual Arts and Performing Arts › Cinema and Media Studies
- Keywords
- writers' rooms, television drama production, Borgen, The Killing, television series development
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