The collapse of the film market in 2020 opened up an opportunity for producers and series creators and brought a significant reinvigoration to the serial scene. Not only due to the investor activity of Netflix, but also the multi-year development of this part of the audiovisual market. Polish producers started to create more and faster, but their actions rarely brought a satisfactory artistic effect.
Evidence that quantity rarely translates into quality in the entertainment industry was provided by, for example, Player, a leading Polish VOD service, which, thanks to its links with TVN, is becoming one of the leaders in serial production. In just the last few months, the platform presented, among others, Szadź (Hoar Frost) with Maciej Stuhr as a serial killer, and The Elements of Sasza based on Katarzyna Bonda’s novel, although both of these detective stories turned out to be unintentional self-parody realised without panache and skill.
The state-funded Polish Television, which had a gigantic production budget at its disposal in this difficult year, also disappointed with the mediocrity of its proposed series. The wartime drama Ludzie i Bogowie (People and Gods) by Bodo Koks turned out to be a naive patriotic comic book, Conspirators about Józef Piłsudski’s youth felt artificial and grated due to its production shortcomings, while the long-awaited Osiecka changed the biography of that wonderful poet into a school textbook sprinkled with mothballs.
The fact that 2020 was not a good year for the Polish series was also confirmed by the creators working for Canal+. Aired in the summer and bearing the name of the much-loved Juliusz Machulski, Mały Zgon (Small Demise) turned out to be a banal comedy, in which there was more nonsense than good humour or interesting plot, and the series The King by Jan P. Matuszyński, based on the novel by Szczepan Twardoch [published in English as The King of Warsaw – ed.], from episode to episode was increasingly disappointing due to a lack of pace and its dramatic obviousness. And although The King was still the most ambitious attempt in the barren sea of the past 12 months, it’s difficult to talk about artistic or viewership success here (subsequent episodes were watched by only 155,000 viewers). This lazily-told overly-theatrical series shows how far we are today from the world productions of Peaky Blinders or Babylon Berlin. Let us hope that in the coming months the cards will turn a bit in our favour and the announced premieres of Warszawianka (HBO), Klangor (Canal+) and Sexify (Netflix) will show people how we in Poland definitely can create intriguing serial stories. Hopefully, thanks to them, 2021 will turn out to be a bit better than the past twelve dark months.
Originally written in Polish, Dec 2020, translated by AZ, Dec 2020