The New Force Review 2025 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
It’s 1958, and Carin is among the first class of female police officers in the city of Stockholm, along with her roommates Siv Morell (Agnes Rase) and Ingrid Gustafsson (Malin Persson). After they graduate the academy, they’re assigned to the police district in Klara, the city’s most crime-ridden neighborhood. The city opened up recruiting to women because of a personnel shortage in the police department, and while the women’s arrival is met with press and fanfare, the male officers and detectives are mostly not happy that they’re there. Most don’t even consider them real police officers.
The first day on patrol with their training officers is tough for the women. Ingrid’s partner doesn’t even talk to her. Siv and her partner bring in a drunk who brandishes a knife at the police station, and her partner lies and says he told her to search him and she didn’t.
Carin’s partner, Johan Reimer (Christopher Wagelin) is a bit more accommodating, but things go awry when they chase down a prostitute named Monica (Camila Bejarano Whalgren), who robbed a married customer, and he tells Carin to go talk to her. Of course, Monica is completely resistant, and a scuffle ensues.
As she changes to go home, Carin finds out that she lost her badge, a huge no-no on the force. That night, she decides to go back to where Monica was working and try to find her; she lies her way into the brothel where Monica works and gets in so deep she meets Jack Hellman (Leonard Terfelt), the pimp that takes a cut from Monica and the other women. She finds herself in a situation where her academy training comes in play, and her roommates tell her she can’t go into situations like that by herself.
In the meantime, Siv, whose father was a cop, gets the attention of Detective Inspector Oscar Thornberg (Hannes Fohlin), one of the few veteran cops who seems to welcome the presence of the women at the Klara station.
The New Force, written by Patrik Ehrnst and directed by Rojda Sekersöz, doesn’t take a kitschy approach to the the story of Stockholm’s first female police officers, even though there is fake “film” footage to reenforce the show’s 1958 vibes. The women that are in this first group of female cops are going to get themselves into some pretty serious situations, and make the same mistakes all rookie cops make.
That approach definitely leads to a tightrope act when it comes to telling this story, and the first episode is evident of this dichotomy. The first half of the episode consists of the new officers — and specifically, Carin, Siv and Ingrid — navigating the extreme misogyny they face from their male colleagues, including the officers that are supposed to be training them. But most of the second half has Carin taking her own initiative and going undercover just to retrieve her badge. We see her get in way over her head and escape by a thread, but her adventure in the brothel had dire consequences, especially for Monica.
Part of the season is going to be Carin and her associates trying to get the attention of the detectives in investigating Monica’s death. As one of the lead detectives tell her, sex workers are low priority, and male detectives make assumptions about them that may not be true. We hope that Carin and company prevail and Monica’s death gets investigated further, but it will be an uphill battle through all of that bias.
But what will this show end up being? Will it be about the lives of these women as they trailblaze? Or will it be about serious crimes that they solve? Can it be about both and make tonal sense?
