Rederiet

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Rederiet
M/S Birka Princess played the fictional M/S Freja in Rederiet
Genre	Drama
Format	Soap opera
Created by	Louise Boije af Gennäs Peter Emanuel Falck
Directed by	Filippa Wallström Marcelo Racana Christian Wikander Thomas Hellberg
Starring	Gösta Prüzelius Johannes Brost Kenneth Söderman Hans V. Engström Bert-Åke Varg Gaby Stenberg Bengt Bauler Thomas Hellberg Peter Harryson Mikael Samuelson Suzanne Reuter Per Holmberg
Theme music composer	Anders Neglin
Country of origin	Sweden
Language(s)	Swedish
No. of seasons	20
No. of episodes	318 (List of episodes)
Production
Running time	45 min
Broadcast
Original channel	Sveriges Television
Original run	1992 – 2002
External links
Official website
IMDb profile

Rederiet (High Seas or The Shipping Company) was a long-running (318 episodes) Swedish soap opera that aired on Sveriges Television between 1992 and 2002.

The cast featured many popular and renowned Swedish actors, and the show has often been referred to as Sweden's version of Dynasty. The 45-minute episodes ran weekly on Thursday nights on the public service channel 1 and normally had between one and two million viewers. For 10 years Rederiet was the number-one rated show on Swedish television, along with the TV4 rival show Tre kronor. The rivalry for the viewers can be compared to that between Dynasty and Dallas.

Rederiet also gained popularity in Finland on YLE TV2, and the show was also a hit in Norway on NRK. The first season of the show was also sold to Egypt. The later seasons of the series were produced in collaboration with YLE, which most notably led to Finnish actor Åke Lindman appearing the series.

[edit] Plot

The story is about a shipping company which conducts cruiseferry traffic on the Baltic Sea between Stockholm in Sweden and Turku in Finland. It takes place on board M/S Freja, portrayed in the series by the Finnish registered M/S Birka Princess, which later became the M/S Sea Diamond and sank in on on April 6, 2007. In the series the ship has different funnel colours from the ones in real life; in reality they were blue, yellow and red but in the series they were retouched to appear as different shades of blue. The show follows life on board the ship, mostly focusing on the crew and captain, but also on some of the passengers. The plot often involves love, breakups, accidents, deaths, murders, smuggling, theft, arson, rape, drugs, and insanity.

Another part of the story takes place on land, following the life of the Dahléns, the capitalist family who owns and runs the shipping company. There are also rival capitalists who try to gain control over the company, which leads to a constant struggle for power.