The new TV series is a kind of continuation of the drama "Shards of a Marriage" that aired on Swedish Radio a while ago.
Jonatan Unge and actress Sissela Benn first thought about making a drama series about their breakup, with scenes from the therapy couch inspired by Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes from a Marriage" and the TV series "In Treatment".
"A tragedy"
But they were rejected by everyone - except SVT's humor department. So what had been difficult had to be made funny.
It was actually quite a good fit. For people who are in the middle of a breakup, it's a tragedy and it was a lot of work. But in retrospect, it's actually really fun.
Jonatan Unge says.
Much is taken from their own separation. Jonatan Unge's character Ingmar struggles with his stand-up career, while Sissela Benn's Liv is an actor stuck in a comedy niche she is a little ashamed of and has difficulty getting new jobs.
But Jonatan Unge points out that a lot is fictionalized.
The various conflicts are taken from things that we had conflicts over. Then, as usual, you add and subtract, improvise and keep going.
"Some sea"
Jonatan Unge says, half-jokingly, that he and Sissela Benn were able to work through their relationship, which ended over ten years ago, at SVT's expense.
It gave us time to go through our breakup and our relationship in a way we hadn't done before. We could talk through how she thought, how I thought, and how we experienced things.
Jonatan Unge is constantly in the spotlight and appears in many contexts. He participates in a number of different podcasts, and tours as a stand-up comedian. He also commutes weekly between Malmö, where he has a teenage daughter, and Stockholm, where his son and his girlfriend, the artist Little Jinder, live.
Jonatan Unge has also been open about the fact that order and administrative tasks are not his strong suit. How does it all fit together?
I say yes to almost everything and then I regret it. And after I've done it, I often think it was pretty fun. But it's a lot of work, too.
I think I'm going to be on a podcast in an hour and I haven't written a word for it. So I don't know how it's going to turn out. It happens sometimes when things get complicated.
"Popular Problems" premieres on January 16 on SVT Play and comes to SVT1 on January 31.
Mikael Forsell/TT
Facts: Jonatan Unge
TT
Age: 47.
Family: 14-year-old daughter and three-year-old son, girlfriend Josefine "Little Jinder" Jinder. Son of prominent journalists Cecilia Hagen and Ingemar Unge.
Lives: In Malmö and Stockholm.
Background: Broke out as a stand-up comedian in the late 2000s and participated in P3 programs such as "Tankesmedjan" and "Morgonpasset" in the 2010s. Early on, he became one of the country's largest podcasts, including "Lilla drevet". He is now involved in several others, such as "Stormens utveckling" and "Della Monde värmen". He has competed in "På spåret" several times and won the competition in 2021/22 with Cecilia Duringer.
