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EXCLUSIVE: When Whiskey-class Soviet submarine U137 ran aground in Sweden in 1981 it sparked a diplomatic fracas that threatened to ignite a global conflict. With nukes possibly in play, it was no laughing matter. The team behind Whiskey on the Rocks, a satirical take on the Cold War sub drama, beg to differ.
“Whiskey on the Rocks jokes about something as serious as when we stood on the threshold of a third world war, and it’s absolutely the right thing to do because the world needs more humor and self-awareness, not less,” Jonas Jonasson, the Swedish author of ‘The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared’, says, speaking exclusively to Deadline.
He wrote an original story, from which Whiskey on the Rocks has been forged. The ensuing six-part series dropped on SVT over the festive period, generating big numbers for the Swedish pubcaster. It is also the first Nordic original for Disney+ and launches on the streamer in the EMEA region (ex-MENA and Turkey) on January 22. In the U.S., it rolls out on Hulu.
The 1981 incident turned the screw on already strained East–West relations and tested Sweden’s neutral position. Its Prime Minister, Thorbjörn Fälldin, played by Rolf Lassgård in the series, told his forces to hold the border with Russia. Jonasson remembers the real-world drama: “The submarine days in October 1981 were in every way as real as they were surreal. I was 20 years old at the time, and I remember how an entire nation and half the world held their breath for 10 whole days.”
The team who put the series together comprises several of those who brought ‘The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window’ to the big screen in 2013 including prolific European TV drama producer Patrick Nebout and Whiskey on the Rocks screenwriter and exec producer Henrik Jansson-Schweizer. They produce the show under the Humanoids banner.
The initial plan was for a straight-up drama, but that did not pan out, Jansson-Schweizer explains. “We have Brezhnev, who was senile and alcoholic; Ronald Reagan, who was a new President at the time; and we had NATO. In between, we had a submarine that had hit the shore a stone’s throw from Sweden’s largest naval base, and there’s a Swedish Prime Minister who was a sheep farmer who couldn’t speak a word of English. Try to make a thriller out of that. It’s impossible.”
“We couldn’t really crack the code until Patrick called me one day and said: ‘Hey, what about a satire?’”
The resulting series establishes its satirical chops early. In the opening instalment, two Swedish fisherman (very) slowly ponder the fact a huge foreign sub has crashed into their coastline. Cut to President Reagan sporting a cowboy hat and enjoying some shooting practice, using targets emblazoned with the face of Leonid Brezhnev. The Soviet leader, meanwhile, sinks bottles of vodka, while mostly forgetting to whom he is talking.
A TV show about the 1980s crisis brought modern-day production challenges. The labor strikes in the U.S. meant the producers looked to the UK for their Ronald Reagan, with British actor Mark Noble playing POTUS. There is an all-Lithuanian cast for the Russian characters, led by Kestutis Stasys Jakstas as Brezhnev.
The series is about power, diplomacy and politics, but the team were decidedly non-partisan. “We’re not pointing fingers,” director Björn Stein explains. “Swedes, Russians, Americans − there are idiots everywhere. We don’t have a political standpoint with this. It’s more like men with power abuse it repeatedly, and diplomacy is the way to go. That’s what we’re communicating.”
The absurd elements work because they ring true, mostly anyhow. “This series is inspired by a true story,” a disclaimer at the top of each ep proclaims, with the following caveat: “Some characters and locations have been altered for reasons of national security. Quite a few to be honest…”
The balancing act for the producers was to lean into the humor but also deliver the necessary high-stakes drama. Scenes inside the sub, or of the military mobilizing for battle have the requisite dramatic edge. The director found a method for keeping the thriller elements thrilling.
Stein says: “I came up with the idea, ‘What if we don’t tell the DP, don’t tell the set designer, don’t tell anybody that this is supposed to be funny? Of course, we told them later, but we wanted their mentality and their approach to be the same as for a traditional spy thriller. By using this visual language, we can slide from the funny bits to the thrilling bits without changing costume, so to speak.”
With East–West relations tense once more, and a plethora of global crises either in the making or playing out, Whiskey on the Rocks is a show about the past that speaks to the present.
Jonasson is “proud and happy that the series will be shown worldwide.” If the show gets airtime in the Kremlin, White House and beyond, so much the better. “I hope Putin, Trump and all the others watch, laugh, and take it to heart,” the author says.
