Leading Denmark’s top crime unit, she’s forced to investigate when a dockland security guard is murdered and a large shipment of pills containing a lethal opioid goes missing. Fremantle is handling international sales. Miso Film, a Fremantle company, is behind Netflix’s “The Rain,” “The Investigation” and “Those Who Kill,” as well as “The Uniform.” Other upcoming projects include “The Cold Song,” “The Traitor Within” and “Royal Blood.” “Miso Film has killed a lot of people across its productions during the years, and I’m guilty of a few of those murders myself.
When we started working on this series, we talked about creating a new serial killer series. But every meeting ended with a desire to do something different and closer to reality,” said Lasse Kyed Rasmussen, the show’s creator and main writer. But, like so many other major cities in Europe, we do have a real killer on the loose in the form of the drugs that claim the lives of many young people every year.” Now, the classic serial killer is replaced by “deadly opioids that keep spreading and constantly claiming new victims.” “The idea for the show started when we asked ourselves: what is actually killing people in 2026?
The obvious and alarming answer was street drugs,” noted Rasmussen. During their research, the team talked to the police, read books and listened to podcasts to make sure that every element of the plot had a connection to reality. And many people know a child, relative or friend who has a connection with drugs.
There is never just one victim when a person starts taking drugs.” Drug abuse affects many people, “both within families and across society.” That became the core of the show. The result is a world where danger is never abstract, and where every personal loss carries emotional weight.” The team talked about the likes of “Pusher 2,” “Irréversible,” “Succession,” “Mobland,” “Dopesick” and more, but Rasmussen can’t really think of an obvious comparison that feels exactly like “Side Effects.” “Much of the credit for that goes to Jonas Arnby and his talented team, whose vision has given the show a visual identity all its own,” he noted. Producer Jonas Allen already worked with Arny on “The Uniform,” shot mainly at the police academy and the outskirts of Copenhagen.
But while the city is one of its stars, Josephine Park shines the brightest as Nora: a flawed mother, a great cop with ambitions and a person with a lot of vices. The crime genre almost demands a main character with an unhealthy work-life balance. You could also say that Nora works far too much.
But we always had a strong ambition to create a character that is both a cop and a mother,” said Rasmussen. Even though Nora is leading the war on drugs, even she cannot shield her daughter from it. She’s simply the mother of one of the many ordinary young people who give in to temptation and end up with a serious drug problem.
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