A Better Man

Thomas Seeberg Torjussen's A Better Man won Best Series and Best Performance (Anders Baasmo) at Canneseries 2025 and was the most-discussed Norwegian drama of the year. It belongs to a long Scandinavian line of socially confrontational chamber drama (Vinterberg, Trier, Bier), but it takes on an urgent contemporary subject, masculinity online, that few earlier prestige dramas had treated seriously.

Anders Baasmo plays a recently divorced Norwegian man in his forties who has been drifting into the manosphere, an ecosystem of pickup-artist forums, men's-rights podcasts and online communities fuelled by resentment. He decides to infiltrate a women's online forum, disguised as a woman, to find out what women really say about men. The real subject of the series is what he learns as he reads their actual conversations, and what slowly forms in him as he does. Ingrid Unnur Giæver and Irena Sikorskytė, as women who deal with him under his assumed identity, ground its harder ethical questions.

Coverage often paired Torjussen's series with Adolescence, the British miniseries that had premiered earlier the same year. Both deal with online male radicalisation, but the Norwegian series works from inside the man being radicalised, where the British show looked at the family around the perpetrator. The Canneseries win is more evidence, a decade after the international breakout of Skam, that Norwegian television is one of the most thoughtful drama cultures in Europe.