ABC To Remake Ack Värmland For The US

TV4 Sweden’s hit comedy series Ack Värmland which premiered this year has been picked up by ABC for a US remake. The pilot is written by Trophy Wife creators Emily Halpern and Sarah Haskins. The director of the original show, Ulf Malmros, will co=produce.

Ack Värmland (international title Small Town Love) stars Mia Skäringer and Ida Hallquist as a working class mother and her daughter who become pregnant at the same time by their deadbeat boyfriends and have to share a tiny house. It chronicles how the relentlessly positive Annette and her super sarcastic daughter Fanny and their less-than-stellar baby daddies get by.

First aired on TV4 in March 2015, the ten part comedy series opened with 1.9 million viewers and averaged 1,639,600 viewers. A second series has been ordered and is currently in pre-production.

Nordic World’s Espen Huseby (who brokered the deal) says that format rights of Scandinavian comedy series are currently popular with world broadcasters, and that interest in original language versions is slowly picking up.