It's easy to miss, since the main focus is on Young Royals as a gay love story, with the bit about an heir to the Swedish throne who falls in love with a non-royal being little more than a device to drive the plot.
A google search shows that the first season made it to the top 10 in 12 countries briefly and was streamed for more than 9.8 million hours worldwide. In the first week after its release, the first season was ranked the 8th most streamed non-English language series on Netflix worldwide. In case you're not in that number, here's a quick plot summary from the show's Wikipedia page:Young Royals is a Swedish teen drama romance streaming television series on Netflix. Set at the fictional elite boarding school Hillerska, the plot primarily follows the fictional Prince Wilhelm of Sweden (Edvin Ryding), his romance with fellow male student Simon Eriksson (Omar Rudberg), and the drama which results.
A soap opera, from all appearances. Television for teens. Just another of hundreds of coming-out stories for the LGBT community, maybe.
But you can't miss the fact that while this is for all progressive thinkers these days, including probably the vast majority of people under twenty-five, a feel-good romance, it's also very much a study of rapid, possibly too rapid, social change. It's a gay love story, a very sweet one, and let's ring the bells for that. But it's also an unmistakable clash between not so much homophobia as the power of social norms, status quo and tradition on the one hand and individual freedom on the other. Even if you agree on the importance of aggiornamento, to use Pope John XXIII's term for "updating" the values of society in Roman Catholic terms, you have to recognize that drama and serious conflict are inevitable. The argument here over change between conservatives and progressives is less about the what, far more about the how fast.
The attack on the monarchy, the thorn in Crown Prince Wilhelm's side, is a relatively gentle one. Wilhelm loves his mother, the Queen, and she is loving and accepting of her son's need to explore his sexuality (this is Sweden, after all). But she is also a staunch defender of the notion that Sweden must provide not just an heir, but a blood heir, to keep the institution of the monarchy going. Sweden, she says in effect, is the monarchy. For Wille not to produce an heir is to betray his country. One imagines her saying to herself, "We all get over our first loves! Let's get our priorities straight."
Given the attitudes of modern Swedes, it's not too much to expect they might toss around the possibility of a gay king. Even call it, like the idea of a female president in the U.S., an idea whose time is way overdue. But Mama is clearly nowhere near ready to take her progressive parenting ideas to this future possibility. Even if Wille were to produce an heir with a high-born surrogate, would the country be able to wrap its head around the notion? Not bloody likely. What are the chances of finding another royal willing to surrogate? Even less likely. You see how quickly this notion spins off into the ridiculous.
So we are not yet in the year 2066, or whenever such a notion might actually be entertained seriously. We're in 2021 (when Young Royals comes out), and both Mama (the good cop), and the royal advisor (bad cop) are determined that Wille has to put duty over any personal relationship and ditch this non-royal lover of his.
Note the implications. Sweden may be a modern progressive democracy. But the story centers on royal "blood" and on the arrogant snobs at this elitist private school. Even the scholarship students, Simon and his sister, Sara, are sucked into the belief that they are second-class, for a time and to a degree. Wille finds a confidant in another gay student, Nils, but even Nils advises Wille to "stick to his own kind" and juggles the question of having to come out one day as the first CEO of a major company. It's a world of winners and losers, or "top-drawer" people and nobodies.
Another aspect of this drama viewed as a sociological study is the fact that these 16-year-olds are highly sexual beings. There is open depiction of masturbation on several occasions, as well as full-on penetrative sex and everybody talks as if such goings-on were all around and commonplace. Ironic, since the show has an "adult audience" rating. Or maybe the word should be "cutting-edge." The casting of Wilhelm as a Swedish blue-blood and Simon as an Hispanic immigrant (Omar is Venezuelan-born in real life) was brilliant. They're both way older than 16, but Wilhelm's teenage acne went a long way to making these characters believable.
The real bad guy in the story is August, a second-cousin to Wilhelm. Nasty, manipulative, self-serving in the extreme. Unafraid to do anybody in almost for the fun of it. And what does he get for being a thoroughly rotten character? The Queen actually taps him to be the replacement in line for the throne in the event that Wilhelm wusses out. So much for looking out for Sweden's best interests.
I watched Young Royals when it first came out a couple years ago and on a whim just watched the whole two seasons again, on a binge. I'm glad I did. I loved the love story. Loved hating August and the whole concept of an upper-class boarding school. Got to feel terribly superior about my working-class roots. Love being an amateur sociologist.
I have to admit that I'm not against the idea of having an updated, de-fanged monarch as head of state, given the evidence that the American decision to put head of state and head of government into the same person has turned out to be a terrible mistake. But this depiction of the Swedish royal household, if even partially accurate in tone, suggests to me we need to think more the way the Germans have done in selecting a respected elder to the office of president to do the head-of-state job. It's not just that I think strangling young love is a crime against humanity. I also think there's something really wrong about calling yourself a democracy and then putting your fate in the hands of so-called blue bloods and requiring everybody to speak of them in terms of "highness" and "majesty."
Thanks Lisa, Lars and Camilla, for prompting me to give more thought to the question than when Elizabeth II died and Charles-who-barks-when-the-pens-don't-work took over. You can move me into the anti-monarchist column now.
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