From the “glass cliff” to the “ice floe”

Gender, ageing e crisis leadership in Borgen - Power and Glory (Netflix–DR, 2022)

Abstract

This article examines the narrative construction of crisis leadership at the intersection of gender and ageing through the analysis of the Danish political drama Borgen - Power & Glory (Netflix–DR, 2022), situated within the Nordic noir tradition. Focusing on the trajectory of Brigitte Nyborg – a former Danish prime minister who returns to high political office as Minister of Foreign Affairs in her fifties – the study investigates how the series represents leadership under conditions of overlapping crises and how these conditions shape the legitimacy of female later-life leadership.

Methodologically, the study combines a background analysis which situates the series within its cultural and production context with a qualitative narrative analysis of the season, organised around two interconnected dimensions: crisis visibility as the condition through which leadership is continuously evaluated, and gender and ageing as intersecting sites of public legitimacy and personal vulnerability. The findings show how Nyborg’s leadership is progressively shaped by the accumulation of crises – namely geopolitical, environmental, institutional and personal ones. While early assertions of sovereign authority increase political visibility, they also contribute over time to isolation, delegitimisation and moral strain. Leadership evaluation is further intensified by gendered and age-related expectations, as authority becomes entangled with motherhood, generational conflict, emotional conduct and the visible ageing female body, particularly through the narrative problematization of menopause.

The article argues that, rather than conforming to the logic of a sudden fall implied by the glass cliff, Borgen - Power & Glory articulates a shift from the “glass cliff” to the “ice floe”, capturing a gradual process of erosion, in which prolonged crisis management, adaptive compromise and sustained visibility destabilize leadership from within, contributing to a more complex and ambivalent representation of female leadership in contemporary serial drama.