Ride Upon the Storm

Ride Upon the Storm is a Danish drama series. It aired on DR1 from 1 October 2017 to 2020. Adam Price created it, the same writer behind Borgen. Lars Mikkelsen plays Johannes Krogh, the powerful patriarch of a family of Lutheran ministers in Denmark.

Johannes has spent his life serving the church, but his faith has become tangled with pride and ambition. Ann Eleonora Jørgensen plays Elisabeth, his wife, who holds the family together while her own needs go unmet. Simon Sears plays Christian, the favoured eldest son who follows his father into the church. The younger son August, played by Adam Price's choice of a lesser known actor, rebels against everything the family stands for. The story follows three generations of Krogh men and the women who love them, endure them, and sometimes leave them. The series has two seasons and 20 episodes.

What I Loved

Lars Mikkelsen is extraordinary. He plays Johannes as a man who speaks of God with real conviction but treats the people closest to him with careless cruelty. The gap between what he preaches and how he lives creates a tension that runs through every scene. You see a man who believes he is good and cannot understand why his family falls apart around him.

Adam Price writes families the way few others can. The Krogh household feels real. The arguments at the dinner table, the silences in the hallway, the weight of a father's expectations on his sons. The show deals with faith not as a simple question of belief but as something that shapes how people love, fail, and forgive. The Danish church setting is unusual for television and gives the show a world that feels both familiar and strange.

Why You Should Watch

It takes religion seriously without preaching. Each episode lasts about 55 minutes. The two seasons tell a story about fathers and sons, duty and desire, and whether faith can survive the people who carry it. Fans of Borgen will recognise the quality of the writing. Fans of family drama will find something deeper than most shows dare to go.

The cast performs with a stillness that draws you in. Big feelings live under small gestures. A handshake, a hymn, a closed door. The show asks whether a man who speaks for God can be forgiven for the same sins he condemns in others. It does not answer easily, and that honesty is what makes it worth watching.

Favourite Quote

"I have spent my whole life speaking to God. I am no longer sure He is listening."

Johannes says this in a moment of rare honesty. The man who built his life on faith faces the silence he always feared. The line is quiet and devastating, and Lars Mikkelsen delivers it with the weight it deserves.

Takeaway

Faith tested by life is the only faith worth having. The show teaches that fathers pass down their flaws as readily as their values. Duty to an institution can blind a person to the needs of those who depend on them. Forgiveness asks more than most people can give. And the hardest sermon to hear is the one your own life preaches back at you.

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