The Legacy (TV series)


The Legacy is a Danish television drama series created by Maya Ilsøe and produced by DR, starring Trine Dyrholm, Carsten Bjørnlund, Marie Bach Hansen, and Mikkel Boe Følsgaard. The series is a family drama, telling the story of four siblings trying to cope with the fallout from their mother's death, which has turned all of their lives upside down.
The first season, consisting of ten episodes, premiered on DR1 on 1 January 2014. The second season of seven episodes aired from 1 January 2015, and the third season of nine episodes began on 1 January 2017. The series won several awards, and was sold to over 40 countries.
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Synopsis

The Legacy starts out at the legendary manor Grønnegaard on southern Funen, where the internationally renowned artist Veronika Grønnegaard has lived an eccentric and colourful life since the wild sixties. The series follows Veronika's four adult children, whose free and chaotic childhood at Grønnegaard has left its mark on them in very different ways. They live scattered around the country, until Veronika unexpectedly dies and they are forced to gather to wind up the estate. Just before she dies, Veronika leaves the manor to her daughter Signe, who was given up for adoption. Signe lives with her partner in a quiet residential area in the local town and had not previously known the truth of her parentage, although her adoptive parents, the Larsens, did know. Each of the children had different relationships with the matriarch, and each also have complications in their own lives.
The second season of The Legacy begins one year after the events of the first. The third season begins three years after the events of season two.

Production and themes

According to Trine Dyrholm, one of the series' themes is the legacy of "the 1968 generation".
Before filming the third season, Dyrholm said, "The second season is kind of the aftermath of the war – the war within the family – a new order has been established. The first season was about where you come from, and the second season is how you live with that, and the third season should be something about what kind of imprint you leave".

Release

The first season of The Legacy aired on DR1 from 1 January 2014. It was sold to a number of other countries worldwide before its Denmark premiere.
Screening rights were sold to over 40 countries, including:
Following the success of the first season, a second season consisting of seven episodes began airing on Danish television on 1 January 2015. In the UK, the second season began airing on 12 June 2015, and in Australia on 30 August 2016.
The third and final season aired weekly from 1 January to 26 February 2017 on DR1.

Reception

The first season reached nearly 2 million viewers in Denmark, of a population of 5.6 million.
In July 2014, the rights were sold to Universal Cable Productions, the production arm of NBCUniversal Media Group, who planned to develop an American version with Hypnotic. At that point, the original had not been screened in the US.

Critical reception

Gerard Gilbert, writing for The Independent, called the first season "one of the best TV dramas of the past year or so".
Kylie Northover of The Sydney Morning Herald praised the acting and described the series as "beautifully, moodily filmed". Another Australian reviewer, writing for The Toowoomba Chronicle, called it "the best new series on TV this year.... just superior TV. It's well acted, sophisticated, oddly claustrophobic and compelling".
Rebecca Rose, writing for the Financial Times after discovering the series during the COVID-19 pandemic, described it as "the Danish successor to Succession", the American series that aired from 2018, and praised its writing and characterisation.