Lilyhammer: Season One Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.5

Lilyhammer: Season One Blu-ray Movie Review

He's the boss.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 30, 2013

Steven Van Zandt may have spent much of his professional music career working for The Boss as part of Springsteen’s E Street Band, but in Lilyhammer, a decidedly whimsical Norwegian-American co-production which became Netflix’s first television series, Van Zandt is himself the boss—as in a Mafioso capo. The Hollywood Reporter’s breathless announcement that Lilyhammer had scored a record viewership of 998,000 in Norway for its premiere episode might seem like small change for Americans accustomed to seeing big hits rake in audiences of well over ten million (in days of yore it used to be many times that), until one realizes that 998,000 is fully 20% of Norway’s entire population. The show hasn’t had quite the impact in the United States that it has enjoyed overseas, but this new Blu-ray release might inspire those who either don’t subscribe to Netflix or who don’t like the bottleneck of streaming and the iffy quality it can engender to check out the series. Lilyhammer is in its own way rather reminiscent of a long ago broadcast series that trafficked in much the same territory—latitudinally if not actually geographically. Much as Northern Exposure posited an uptight New York doctor who has to adjust to the wilds of Alaska, Lilyhammer offer Van Zandt as New York gangster Frank “The Fixer” Tagliano, who, after a shakeup in the local pecking order of professional thugs, finds himself on the receiving end of an attempted hit, which in turn nudges him into testifying against The Mob. He’s offered a Witness Relocation plan as his reward, and rather unexpectedly, he asks to be sent to Lillehammer, Norway, since he had found the country so beautiful when he had watched the 1994 Winter Olympics on television. Of course, watching the picturesque locales of a frigid, snow encrusted land from the warmth and comfort of your urban living room is one thing—actually living there is quite another.

Van Zandt (whose helmet hair on the cover photo of the Blu-ray makes him look for all the world like some 18th century lord rather than Silvio from The Sopranos) plays Tagliano as a tough as nails, no nonsense kind of guy who nonetheless has a heart of gold. Tagliano is given the new identity of Giovanni Henriksen (talk about the offspring of “mixed marriages”) and is set up in a tiny little rowhouse in the outskirts of Lillehammer. Frank attempts to learn the language, but almost instantly he finds that English suffices just fine when he’s doling out little dollops of justice American style. On a train into town he confronts a young teenage punk who’s playing his boom box inordinately loud and who has also taken an elderly man’s winter cap from him. Even if the kid didn’t speak English, it’s obvious that he gets Frank’s message just fine when Frank confronts him in a restroom. Later, after having arrived at his new digs and while out for a drive one day, Frank almost ends up hitting an errant sheep which is standing in the middle of a snowy road. Frank delivers it to a nearby home, and once again finds that English gets his point across, especially with the home’s resident, pretty local woman Sigrid (Marian Saastad Ottesen), who had coincidentally seen Frank on the train earlier.

Though the location has changed, Frank’s personality hasn’t, and he decides to set himself up once again in the nightclub business, something that had brought him untold success in the Big Apple. Along the way he runs into Lillehammer’s rather arcane bureaucracy, including a patently odd worker at the local employment office who delivers maxims on how to conduct interviews replete with a ventriloquist dummy that looks like a distant cousin to Jeff Dunham’s grumpy old man Walter. A number of entanglements ensue, including Frank finding out that his neighbor Laila (Anne Krigsvoll) just happens to be Chief of Police. (The initial meeting between these two is indicative of Lilyhammer’s off kilter but endearing sense of humor. Frank ventures out one morning to find a sheep’s head lying in his front yard. He stares at it in disbelief until Laila comes running up apologizing for having dropped it. Frank heaves a sigh of relief and says, “Oh, good, I thought I was going to have to offer Johnny Fontane a recording contract.” For those who don’t quite understand the reference, a quick brush up on The Godfather might be in order.)

This odd mash-up of a gangster saga with the oft told stranger in a strange land approach might be summed up (and I apologize in advance for the horrible pun) as “you’ll swim with the fishes out of water”, but quite surprisingly Lilyhammer tends to hang together rather well on the strength of its patently odd setting and characters. While certain aspects are predictable (a burgeoning romance between Frank and Sigrid, as well as people starting to poke around Frank-Giovanni’s “past life”), others are so far out in left field that probably no one will see them coming (suffice it to say, there is evidently a Muslim population in Norway). The series is never really laugh out loud hilarious in any traditional sense, but it’s oddly endearing in its own peculiar way. Van Zandt actually makes a rather affable hero, as gruff as his Frank-Giovanni sometimes can be. This series may in fact not win any Gold Medals in its particular Olympics, but it’s probably worthy of a bronze.

Lilyhammer: Season One Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Lilyhammer: Season 1 is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Cinedigm with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. Though technical data on this series is somewhat limited, it appears that this is a digitally shot series, and it boasts an expectedly sharp and well defined image, though one that can't quite handle the very subtle gradations in white tones that tend to make up a lot of establishing shots of Lillehammer and the surrounding countryside. This tends to mean that some of the outdoor shots look slightly blown out at times, without the generally excellent sharpness and fine detail that more tonally varied shots display. Fine detail is quite commendable in close-ups, where Van Zandt's weathered face reveals all of its crinkly "glory". Some interior scenes, notably some in the employment office training seminars, are a bit murky, perhaps at least in part because they appear to have been shot in natural lighting conditions. Light is actually one of the more interesting things about this presentation—there's definitely a different "look" to the light in this series than many Westerners will be used to, something no doubt a result of Norway's far northern climes. The ubiquitous light gray "sunshine" that permeates many scenes only makes the pops of color on interior walls or costumes that much more noticeable.

Lilyhammer: Season One Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Lilyhammer's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 audio gets the job done without much fuss or bother, but also without a lot of depth or separation. The series' rather colorful score, which segues from big band jazz to ethnic Norwegian sounds, is splendidly reproduced here. Dialogue is very cleanly presented in both English and Norwegian (with forced English subtitles). There's not a lot of nuance here, but the series tends to traffic mostly in smaller scale dialogue scenes, so while not "showy" by any stretch of the imagination, this track is perfectly serviceable.

Lilyhammer: Season One Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Concept Art (1080p; 1:01)


• Outtakes (1080p; 5:39)


• The Making of the Theme (1080p; 3:03) shows Van Zandt leading the session to record the theme.

Lilyhammer: Season One Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Lilyhammer isn't a perfect show by any means—it's a bit too precious for its own good at times—but it does benefit from one salient and distinctive element: it's unusual. Van Zandt is surprisingly charming as Frank-Giovanni, and the wacky cast of supporting characters offers a lot of amusing little sidebars in the series' first season. So far, the writing has been rather well modulated, allowing a through line of Frank's efforts to forge a new life for himself to be developed while also highlighting the collision of American and Norwegian sensibilities. The show is often wryly humorous, but there's a none too subtle subtext of potential violence lying just beneath the snowy surface which may end up erupting in subsequent seasons. For those who are sick of cookie cutter television outings, Lilyhammer comes Recommended.