Lilyhammer

Lilyhammer launched on the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK1 in January 2012 and on Netflix in February of the same year, which made it the streamer's first original-content release, more than a year before House of Cards. Netflix had licensed the series rather than commissioning it directly, but academic histories of the platform date the start of its content-production strategy from that streaming launch.

The Norwegian writers Anne Bjørnstad and Eilif Skodvin created the series and developed it with its star Steven Van Zandt, known by then for his decades as the guitarist in Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band and for playing Silvio Dante in The Sopranos. Van Zandt is also a producer, a writer on several episodes and the music supervisor. Because it is a Norwegian-American collaboration, the series is bilingual: Van Zandt's character speaks English throughout while the local characters speak Norwegian, and the show is subtitled accordingly.

It ran for three seasons and twenty-four episodes through 2014, became NRK's highest-rated original drama in over twenty years, and set an early model for international co-productions with a Nordic tone. It was sold to over 130 territories and stayed on Netflix until the rights reverted in 2017; it now streams on various national platforms across Europe.