‘The Killing’ Producer Piv Bernth Talks ‘Feelings and Things,’ ‘Dependency,’ Danish Hit Man Series

Apple Tree Productions, the Danish company headed by “The Killing” producer Piv Bernth, is reteaming with the creative duo behind feelgood period drama “Chorus Girls,” Ditte Hansen and Louise Mieritz, Bernth told Variety at the Monte-Carlo Television Festival.

Hansen and Mieritz are in development on a comedy-drama series, with the working title “Feelings and Things,” set in a shopping mall in contemporary Denmark. It will have the same underlying message as “Chorus Girls”: “We are stronger together,” Bernth said.

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“People working in the shops in the malls get really badly paid but they keep selling things to people who don’t really need them really,” Bernth said.

Danish broadcaster TV2 is a partner on the new show, which will go into production next year.

Hansen and Mieritz are co-writing and will co-direct.

Apple Tree is also attached to a TV adaptation of Tove Ditlevsen’s autobiographical novel “Dependency,” with TV2 on board, Bernth said.

Tove will be played by four actresses in four periods of her life, from the late 1930s to her death in 1976.

The miniseries starts on the final day of her life, when she commits suicide, as she tidies up her financial affairs and delivers her last manuscript to her publisher.

Bernth said Apple Tree’s Danish-U.S. co-production about a Danish hit man, which was to have been co-produced by ITV Studios America, is on hold. The director was to have been Mikkel Norgaard. The writer is Eric Devlin Taylor.

Bernth said Apple Tree has a feature film in development, which has been pitched to Netflix, but its core business remains fiction series.

News of the development of “Feelings and Things” was first reported in Deadline.

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