Jordan Ogihara December 1st, 2020 – 10:20 AM
The HBO limited series The Undoing aired its sixth and final episode on November 30, which brought the cumulative European audience for the program to an approximate total of three million viewers, via The Hollywood Reporter. These figures, as derived from the findings of Comcast-owned premium television network Sky, translates to the amount of European viewers of The Undoing exceeding the number of Sky customers who tuned in for the 2011 debut of Game of Thrones, according to The Hollywood Reporter. This makes The Undoing Sky Atlantic‘s most successful U.S. series to date, as reported by Variety.
The Undoing is a thriller series that stars Nicole Kidman (Big Little Lies, The Hours) and Hugh Grant (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Did You Hear About The Morgans?) as medical professionals who form an upper-crust Manhattanite couple. “A stunning tragedy suddenly rocks their world, someone ends up dead and Grace (Kidman) is left clutching at straws as her carefully manicured life begins to crumble before her eyes,” TV Line reports. The series is based on the novel You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz (Admission, The Devil and Webster), according to Marie Claire.
Kidman and Grant hadn’t worked together before The Undoing, although they both had roles in the Paddington film series. Grant mentioned this in an HBO featurette in which he and Kidman chat about The Undoing. “The bear should have been in this. He should have been a suspect,” he joked.
“We’ve made a… Scandi-noir thriller with a massive… whodunit element,” Grant declares in his conversation with Kidman, referring to the European mystery sub-genre of Scandinavian noir, otherwise known as Nordic noir. The term is used to describe bleak and brutal crime programs, such as Wallander from Sweden and The Bridge from Denmark. In fact, The Undoing reportedly had the all-time best HBO Nordic series launch in Denmark, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Directorial duties on all six episodes were handled by Emmy-winning Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier (Brothers, The Night Manager). Bier dabbled in Nordic noir in 2014 with the film A Second Chance, starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Game of Thrones, New Amsterdam). The director brought along her longtime costume designer Signe Seljund (Brothers, Serena), also Danish, to collaborate on The Undoing, Elle reports. Seljund had also been a costume designer on the first season of the Nordic noir series Those Who Kill.
All six episodes of The Undoing are available to watch on HBO Max.
