Now, just over halfway through its eight episodes, audiences have grown substantially, with more than 900,000 tuning in last week. The rising interest is pegged to the sudden media glare over the series, amidst charges that it’s full of factual errors allowed by producers who took too much artistic license.
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Among the harshest critics are historians and authors who’ve written books about World War II and how Norway’s royal family fled the country shortly after Nazi Germany invaded on April 9, 1940.
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Recent headlines have been merciless: ‘Atlantic Crossing’ puts NRK’s credibility in play, claimed one in newspaper Aftenposten over the weekend. False story-telling disguised as drama read another, while a commentary written by history professor Tom Kristiansen and royal biographer Tore Rem was headlined: NRK gives viewers a fundamentally untrue story.
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At the core of all the fuss is Crown Princess Märtha’s actual role in the war, her close relationship with Roosevelt and whether she actually “changed the course of the war,” as suggested in the series’ own promotion. The debate seemed to reach a climax after last week’s episode, when Norway’s crown princess (a Swedish princess before she married her Norwegian cousin Crown Prince Olav in 1929) was all but given credit for Roosevelt’s famous “Lend-Lease Act,” approved by Congress by March 1941 and aimed at providing arms for Britain to fight off Nazi Germany. It was her personal appeals for help for her country, the series suggests, that convinced Roosevelt to stretch the limits of US neutrality at the time and lend defense supplies to Great Britain, not Winston Churchill’s.
The criticism rages on, from more banal arguments over whether the crown princess’ car really tore down a security boom at the Swedish border when she was fleeing Norway with her children in the backseat, to whether she really opened her new temporary home in suburban Maryland (that Roosevelt helped her find) to traumatized Norwegian merchant marines from vessels torpedoed in the Atlantic. That last part is true.
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Eik and Kallestein have been busy defending their work over the past few weeks since the series began. They stress that it’s not a documentary but rather a “dramatization” of history,” with a good deal of “fiction” interspersed. Every episode of Atlantic Crossing starts with a written claim that it’s “inspired by true events,” and NRK is even publishing accounts on its website after every episode about what was fact and what was fiction. This week’s accounting of 10 scenes in Episode 5 admits that half were fact while the other half weren’t.