Filmin has premiered "The Uniform" ("Uniformen"), a six-episode Danish series set at the Copenhagen Police Academy. The show centers on the conflict between vocation, power and responsibility inside the force.
The story opens with Sanne Hammerby, played by Lene Maria Christensen, arriving for her first day as the academy's newly appointed director, the first woman to hold the post. In her address to students, she tells them that after nearly two and a half years of training, those who become police officers and put on the uniform will emerge as different people.
Hammerby carries her own troubles into the job. Her marriage to Martin, also a police officer and played by Jakob Cedergren, is going through a difficult stretch, with the couple separated while she decides on their future and taking turns caring for their son. She is also dealing with a trauma, including a traffic accident, that is gradually revealed over the course of the episodes. Not all of the academy's veteran instructors welcome having a woman in charge, and a shortage of recruits wanting to become officers forces Hammerby into a series of difficult decisions.
The series is not a standard police procedural. Rather than focusing solely on scenes of police intervention, it aims to show the full transformation ordinary people undergo as they become officers. Its storylines branch across several themes, including loyalty, corruption, racism and media pressure, which can at times make the narrative feel crowded.
Multiple storylines converge
Other threads follow Freja, played by Clara Rosager, a highly demanding and competitive student who is also the daughter of police chief Torben Vermelin, played by Jacob Lohman. The series builds her rivalry with fellow student Liv, played by Mathilde Arcel, who in turn meets her mentor, police intern Youssef Elamin, played by Soheil Bavi.
Youssef and his colleague Daniel, played by Marco Ilso, both want to join the special forces. But a bar fight in the area, which draws in other officers from the station, ends in tragedy when Youssef shoots a 17-year-old from the neighborhood. The fallout spreads through the academy and the Danish police both personally and professionally.
The shooting also affects Tobías, played by Gustav Dyekjær, a young man raised in the academy's neighborhood who tries to escape his past but is forced to confront his mother and a troubled younger brother.
From that point, every decision made by the characters digs further into police ethics. An Internal Affairs officer, Elliot, played by Simon Sears, becomes involved in a storyline that intersects with Hammerby's, as officers grapple with the requirement that use of force be necessary, justified and proportionate. The series also touches on institutional strain and the conflict between vocation, power and responsibility.
A deliberately dark tone
Director Jonas Alexander Arnby and writers Anders Frithiof August and Oscar Dyekjær Giese set out to portray the transformation of young officers, their identity and the inner conflict caused by their decisions, rather than lean on a genre that has already been heavily explored. The series adopts a dark tone that reflects the seriousness of its subject, bringing the camera close to interrogations and to each choice the characters must make.
The portrayal of the force's unbreakable loyalty, which the series presents as producing problems of social and media perception rather than as something positive, is one of its harder edges. Giese said in an interview that some viewers would think the show had been too hard on the police, while others would think the opposite. He said the focus should stay on the transition from ordinary people to officers and their decision-making process, rather than getting lost in the sheer number of storylines, and that the cast succeeds in lifting the series beyond typical fiction about people in blue uniforms carrying guns.
