Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Billionaire Island’ On Netflix, About Two Norwegian Families That Are Fierce Rivals In The Salmon Fishing Business

We didn’t love Succession during its first half-season, and a lot of people we knew felt the same way. We just didn’t like any of the characters or any of the a-holish things they did to each other. But it took about a half a season for the mélange of greed, ego and misplaced intentions to gel into a riveting dramedy. That’s what we see with a new Norwegian show from the producers that brought us Lilyhammer .

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Opening Shot: We see the wake of a boat in the early morning. On a ferry is a woman in a purple business suit and black heels.

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The Gist: Julie Lange (Trine Wiggen), CEO of Marlax, one of the largest Atlantic salmon fishers in Norway, is traveling to a shore town on a Sunday morning to talk to the person who inherited shares of a rival company, Meyer Fijorbruk, after one of the company’s significant shareholders died unexpectedly overseas. Her plan is to have the new shareholder, a commercial fisherwoman, sell her the shares. With the power those shares provide, she’ll look to rally other shareholders to vote to fire Meyer’s board, fire its CEO, Gjert Meyer (Svein Roger Karlsen) and merge the two companies into the largest Atlantic salmon concern on the planet.

Gjert finds out about this during a confirmation ceremony for Julie’s youngest daughter and Gjert’s grandson. Julie, who buys the shares from the fisher — and throws in her Range Rover at the fisher’s request — right before the ceremony, choppers to the church right as the ceremony starts.

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Julie’s oldest daughter, Amy (Ragne Grande), who works for the company as its environmental watchdog, is concerned what ecological message taking over Meyer will send. For his part, Gjert wants to know what prompted the fisher, whom it turns out he knows intimately, decided to sell to Julie, who is no friend of the fishing community. Is it spite?

Gjert’s daughter Trine (Hanne Skille Reitan), finds out from her husband Eigil about Julie’s planned takeover, and is determined to find some dirt on the “snobs” that run Marlax, as she tells her mother (Elisabeth Matheson), who is disabled and rendered mute by a series of strokes.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Succession meets Lilyhammer ; the producers of Billionaire Island , Eilif Skodvin and Anne Bjørnstad, created the latter show (the very first Netflix original series, by the way).

Our Take: There’s a bit more going on during Billionaire Island than we had room to describe in the Gist section, because both the Lange and Meyer families consist of scions and grandchildren that have varying levels of devotion to their respective companies. Amy’s youngest son, for instance, lets his boyfriend pitch her an idea for a TV series, and he seems relatively detached from things. And Gjert’s grandson, who is called “Monobrow” by his boarding school frenemies, is forever feeling inadequate compared to the rest of his family.

At this point, the show is just introducing us to everyone that’s going to be involved in this seemingly silly but ultimately consequential battle over salmon. It’s a pretty classic rivalry, with Julie being the shark-like, take-no-prisoners magnate trying to take over Gjert’s family business. And the two of them have history, as we see when Gjert goes to the confirmation bash for Julie’s daughter to confront his old subordinate about the potential takeover.

Like Succession , Billionaire Island isn’t trying to take itself all that seriously, and how each member of the rival families react to this takeover will go a long way in driving both the funny and serious parts of the narrative. But as of the end of the first episode, we’re just seeing a group of somewhat unlikeable characters doing somewhat unlikable things. But that’s what we also said during the first few episodes of Succession , and we saw where that show went.

Sex and Skin: Amy seems to have some less-than-passionate sex with her husband while in the traditional costume she’s wearing for the confirmation. She doesn’t even take her glasses off.

Parting Shot: Gjert’s grandson finds the knife his grandfather plunged into a desk in anger over the takeover. He uses it to somewhat dangerously trim his monobrow.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Elisabeth Matheson, who has to go through the entire show mostly immobile and unable to speak.

Most Pilot-y Line: Julie flies in a K-pop group for her daughter’s party, and we watch them dance to one of their hits in an extended and unnecessary sequence.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Billionaire Island is just getting started setting up its soapy family rivalry story, and there’s enough there in the first episode to make us hope things will get better.

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com , VanityFair.com , Fast Company and elsewhere.

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