A Better Man

Thomas Seeberg Torjussen's A Better Man won Best Series and Best Performance (Anders Baasmo) at Canneseries 2025, becoming the most-discussed Norwegian drama of the year. The series follows a long Scandinavian tradition of socially confrontational chamber drama (Vinterberg, Trier, Bier) but routes it through an urgent contemporary subject — masculinity online — that few earlier prestige dramas had taken seriously.

Anders Baasmo plays a recently divorced forty-something Norwegian man who has been quietly radicalising in the manosphere — a cultural ecosystem of pickup-artist forums, men's-rights podcasts, and resentment-driven online community. He decides to infiltrate a women's online forum disguised as a woman to see what they really say about men. What he learns, and what slowly forms inside him as he reads the actual conversations of women he claims to be like him, is the central subject of the series. The performances of Ingrid Unnur Giæver and Irena Sikorskytė as women who interact with him under his assumed identity ground the series's harder ethical questions.

Torjussen's series was widely covered as a counter-text to Adolescence — the British miniseries that had premiered earlier the same year — addressing similar concerns about online male radicalisation but from inside the radicalising subject rather than from the family around the perpetrator. The Canneseries result confirms Norwegian television, after the breakout international success of Skam a decade earlier, as one of Europe's most thoughtful drama-producing cultures.