Exclusive: The series written by Real Humans creator Lars Lundström and Anders Sparring will be pitched at Series Mania in Lille.

The 6x60’ Swedish series With One Eye Open produced by Sweden’s Nice Drama (Midnight Sun, Thicker than Water) and London-based Twelve Town (Conspiracy of Silence) , is part of a new trend in scripted content combining suspense with geopolitics.

The project in development is based on the book Ask No Mercy, first of the Max Anger suspense novels written by Martin Österdahl. Before turning to fiction writing, the Swedish author studied Russian, Eastern European Economics and worked on TV productions for twenty years, including as Programme Director for SVT.

His first novel Ask No Mercy published in 2016 was sold to a dozen territories including Denmark, Norway, Germany, and the US. With One Eye Open is set mainly in Stockholm in 1996. The central character is Russian expert Max Anger, who works for the Swedish think tank Vektor, on a mission to find his Russian girlfriend and colleague Pashie Kovalenko, who suddenly goes missing. Max is forced to confront great evil in an attempt to rescue the woman he loves. In the search of the truth, he also has to re-evaluate everything he knows about himself.

UK-based Christian Wikander, Director of Co-Production of Twelve Town (formerly at Pinewood Television) told nordicfilmandtvnews.com: “I read the book just prior to starting my job here in London in 2016, and saw a potential to make a TV series. I asked Nice Drama if they wanted to join me in developing the series.” Stefan Baron, Executive Producer at Nice Drama (Thicker than Water, Midnight Sun) added: “We truly believe this is a unique and very appealing series for the international market.”

Baron says the title With One Eye Open, refers to the fact that ‘the countries around the Baltics have always kept one eye open towards the giant neighbour in the East, Russia’. He continues: “The novel Ask No Mercy is partly set in the 1990s, an exiting time In Russia, and the presidential election of 1996 was a particularly crucial year. No one knew what the world would be like after the elections. With Putin's rapid advance, Russia has once again become more interesting for us in the rest of the world.”

The Nice Drama executive continues: “The story in 1996 has a backdrop to a basically unknown event in 1944, in the Swedish/Russian relations, when Soviet planes dropped bombs in the Stockholm archipelago. The word has it a Soviet spy, who had been imprisoned in Sweden, was released shortly after this incident. This makes for an incredible thriller story when this true-inspired event is interwoven with the story set in 1996.”

So far With One Eye Open has received development support from SVT. The series will be pitched for the first time at Series Mania’s Copro Pitching session in Lille (May 02-04) where Nice Drama and Twelve Town will be looking for European partners.