Sofie Rydman (Ida Engvoll) is an ambitious consultant, married with two children, who starts an assignment for a publishing house, Lund & Lagerstedt, to help them enter the digital age. One evening after a long work day, a young IT technician, Max (Björn Mosten), catches her in a compromising situation in her office. After he uses this as leverage to get a small favor from her, this turns into a flirtatious game of tit-for-tat dares between them, as they start challenging each other to do strange and sometimes outrageous things - which results in some interesting consequences, both for them and the people around them.
The first season premiered on Netflix in November of 2020. The second season was released in June of 2022.
Tropes
- Abusive Parents: Late in the first season, we learn that Max's mother is extremely critical of him and what he does despite apparently being perfectly nice to others and her two younger sons.
- Adaptational Alternate Ending: In-Universe, with StreamUs' adaptation of The Train, a (fictional) classic Swedish novel published by L & L, which serves as the central plot for Episode 3. The book, taking place during World War II, is about a German train that breaks down in Sweden on its way to Norway. The main character helps fix the train even after learning that it's loaded with explosives meant to be used in the occupation of Norway. While the book is written as an allegory about Sweden's passivity in the face of the Nazis during the war, the movie instead ends with the main character blowing up the train, taking away the whole message of the book.
- Age-Gap Romance: Being in her mid-30s, Sofie is 10-15 years older than Max.
- As Himself:
- Swedish actress Lena Endre appears as herself in Episode 2, "Surprise Me", the plot of which revolves around a book about Ingmar Bergman that she's written.
- Various real-life Swedish writers and literary personalities, such as Camilla Läckberg and David Lagercrantz, appear as themselves in Episode 5, "The Book Fair".
- More such people appear as themselves in the fifth episode of Season 2, "Literary Cruise", in which the L&L workers attend a literature conference on a cruise ship. Of special note is Jens Lapidus, who actually plays a role in the episode's story.
- Blackmail: A fairly harmless example. After the aforementioned incident with Sofie in her office, Max takes a picture of her and uses it as leverage to make her get off his back while he has to do some drilling in the office, which she had found disruptive and ordered him to stop. When he's done, he doesn't use it for anything else, and when Sofie assumes he's going to use it to extort money from her and confronts him about this, he just asks her to pay for his lunch - at Burger King. After that, he gives her his phone and helps her completely delete the photo he took. Then, just for fun, she holds the phone hostage and forces him to do something to get it back, and the dare game is on.
- Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: After Sofie is arrested for vandalism in the end of Season 2, Johan comes to visit her and check in on her. In spite of how their marriage soured and ended last season, he is very clearly concerned about her well-being.
- Caring Gardener: Max keeps several house plants in his room in the apartment he shares with three other guys.
- Caught with Your Pants Down: Early in the series, Sofie has a habit of going somewhere private to masturbate while watching porn on her phone as a kind of stress relief. Max catching her doing this in her office becomes the foundation of their dare game.
- Clueless Boss: Ronny, the director of Lund & Lagerstedt. He is apparently a perfectly competent businessman, but he comes from a working class background and doesn't have real personal interest in literature. He especially becomes this in Season 2 when he becomes the company's head of literature while Sofie becomes the new L & L director.
- Dead Person Conversation: Throughout Season 2, Sofie keeps seeing her father after he has committed suicide and talks and argues with him.
- Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: Averted when Caroline notices that Max and Sofie have something going on between them and assumes that she has been sexually harassing him. She treats this very seriously, saying it isn't okay, pointing out that Sofie is in a position of power over him and telling him there are Facebook groups he can go to for support if he needs to talk about it.
- Grammar Nazi: Not technically about incorrect grammar, but Denise's girlfriend, Tove-Lee, is an outspoken feminist who avoids using male-patterned words, specifically "you" in the impersonal pronoun sense, which translates as "man" in sentencesnote in favor of "one". She can get pretty peeved when people who identify as feminists or progressives use "man" in that sense, even calling out Denise when she does it by accident.
- Hate Sink: Max's mother hates her son for no good reason and is very emotionally abusive. She criticises him for the pettiest reasons and couldn't care less about him. She admits that the only reason she invited him to her partner's birthday is because she would have looked bad otherwise.
- Hairy Girl: Some women seen in Season 1, including Denise's feminist girlfriend Tove-Lee, are shown to have hairy armpits.
- Horrible Housing: Max shares an apartment with three other guys because that's the only way for them to afford the rent. Their individual "rooms" are just separated from the central room by rugs and curtains and the shower is in the middle of the apartment.
- Intoxication Ensues: At the book fair in Episode 5, a dare leads Max to spike the team's lunch with cannabis, resulting in Friedrich, Denise and Caroline getting high and ruining the presentation the former two were making.
- Lipstick Lesbian: Denise, at least in comparison to her girlfriend Tove-Lee, who doesn't dress as stylishly and has hair with pink and purple highlights.
- Mental Health Recovery Arc: Season 2 becomes one for Sofie: After her father commits suicide, she and her ex-husband don't want to traumatize their children and tell everyone that he died of a heart attack. The grief and not being able to talk about it makes her break up with Max and apparently have full-on hallucinations of her father. By the end of the season, while she isn't seen telling anyone else the full details of her father's death, she is coping with it better.
- The Load: Friedrich has become this by Season 2 because of his overly conservative ideas of what good literature is and his resistance to change; so much so that Denise has been trying to get Ronny to fire him.
- Money, Dear Boy: An In-Universe example. The writer of The Train, though somewhat disappointed that the movie based on it turned out pretty bad, tells Sofie that she was paid enough for the movie rights by StreamUs to buy a villa in Antibes, so she can live with it.
- Mouth of Sauron: Michelle, the representative of StreamUs, a streaming service with which Lund & Lagerstedt collaborates on the feature film adaptation of a novel and which later buys the publishing house altogether, is the one most associated with the company.
- Naked People Are Funny: The source of humor in some scenes:
- Sofie walking around a hotel swimming pool without any swimming suit bottoms.
- Max appearing almost completely naked at the group photo at the birthday celebration for his mother's boyfriend.
- Sofie seeing one of Max's apartment mates shower because the shower booth is in the middle of the apartment, which gives her a laugh.
- New Media Are Evil: StreamUs doesn't exactly make a friendly impression on the people at L & L in Episode 3, and come off as really shallow after the company buys L & L, something they spend the rest of the season having to deal with.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Some of Sofie and Max's dares have pretty disastrous fallout on those around them, like forcing them to publish a sub-par biography and completely derailing Friedrich and Denise's announcement about the StreamUs purchase at the book fair.
- The Pornomancer: Max is shown to be surprisingly good at picking up women, having multiple casual sexual encounters with different ones in early episodes.
- Power Dynamics Kink: A mild and humorous version. Max blackmails Sofie with a compromising picture of her, telling her to pay for his lunch, then she steals his phone and in turn forces him to do something embarassing at work to get it back. As a result, making each other do increasingly outlandish things becomes the cornerstone of their romantic relationship.
- Refuge in Audacity:
- After the debacle at the book fair, Sofie invites Max along with her to the hotel swimming pool, where she walks around the pool without any swimming suit bottom on, flips off a pool attendant trying to make her stop and then jumps back into the pool from the diving board.
- When Max visits his mother for her boyfriend's birthday party and comes to realize that she doesn't care for him at all, he gets back on her by appearing almost completely naked for a group photo, telling them off and walking away.
- Office Romance:
- Sofie and Max's dare game gradually turns more flirtatious, with the relationship turning sexual after the events at the Gothenburg Book Fair.
- Throughout Season 1, Caroline is hinted to have a bit of a crush on Max and openly propositions him while high at the book fair, which he rejects. In season 2, they actually start dating after Sofie breaks up with Max.
- Shrinking Violet: Nellie, a young, brilliant, but very shy and soft-spoken aspiring writer who tries to submit her manuscript to Lund & Lagerstedt throughout Season 1. She is still working on getting it published in Season 2. By the end of the season, the publishing deal has gotten so badly tangled up in a streaming adaptation deal that she's taken a break from everything about it.
- Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Denise and Friedrich's work together can turn into this, because of their different views and personalities; she is young and progressive while he is a big defender of classic Swedish literature.
- Time Skip: Season 2 begins some months after the ending of Season 1.
- Title Drop: The title of the series is revealed in Episode 2 to be the title of an unfinished novel that Sofie wrote when she was younger (she says her late teens-early 20s).
- Took a Level in Kindness: After doing some soul-searching at an Ayahuasca retreat and coming to terms with some of his questionable recent actions, Friedrich becomes much calmer and nicer to his co-workers and even comforts Max when he suffers a panic attack. It doesn't quite last, since he has mostly gone back to his old ways in Season 2 (though at least he doesn't go as far as he did in the first season, when he was dismissive about old veteran writers sending dick pics).
- Twofer Token Minority: Denise is both the only main cast member to be non-white, being played by an actress of Turkish descent, and the only one to be LGBT, being in a romantic relationship with a woman.
- Villainous Breakdown: While merely antagonistic than outright villainous, Michelle has one of these when the presentation of the publishing house's action package goes insane (due to lack of preparation and Sofie showing up in a bathrobe) as she starts to have an anxiety attack and goes on a rant about how much she works. She finally withdraws the purchase of Lund & Lagerstedt because of this.
- Wham Line: In the Season 2 finale:The Nobel Prize for Literature goes to Vivianne Ivarsen.
- Work Com
