S.P.U.N.G

SPUNG is absolutely the best series/movies about youths ever made..in Sweden. Its pure realistic, the dialouge is genuine and the characters feels like real persons. Nothing like the politically correct characters in Staffan Hildebrands b-movies G, Stockholmsnatt, Ingen kan älska som vi and so on. The soundtrack is great, the look of the series is also great and the actors and actresses does a very nice job portraying the funny characters. My favourite is Kim since he is the most fun character. A typical partyloving animal who talks a lot, is straight forward and childish but not stupid. Just childish.

If you ever get the chance to lay your hands on SPUNG you better take it or else you will definitively miss something great. If you watch the entire series you should prepare with some napkins since the ending of season 2 is really really sad.

Too bad it was never released on VHS/DVD.

Swedish "public service"-TV keeps feeding us with mostly, pure junk, of which this series is another fine example. People that probably were teenagers a long time ago try to make their impression of what is like to be one today, and miss the mark completely. The show feels unrealistic, as a youngster I do not recognize myself at all here. To add to the strived after-realism, it is filmed in very grainy digital video and the lightning is virtually non-existant. Which I find only irritating, when its probably intended to be "cool".

This show got very bad ratings and missed its intended audience completely. In fact, a majority of the people who actually watched it were senior citizens. But since public service is financed by license money that you have to pay if you own a TV, and not what sells, someone came up with the brilliant idea to make a follow-up to the series: Spung 2.0. Wonderful. Stay away from this one. 1/10.

This is a pretty lame attempt at making some some sort of realistic teen drama. The dialog is between the characters is very amateur-ish. The actors maybe could do well in other tv shows or films or/and with different directors and screenwriters. And the directors of this Tv-show should take a lesson from Lukas Moodyson and use actual teenagers as actors ,not a bunch of twenty-somethings. But well, this show got some media attention mainly for using some segments filmed with Super-8 (?)I just heard that the have made new episodes for the fall to be shown on SVT, and that suprises me.

This is it. The ultimate teen depiction, its so realistic is creepy.

Being the same age as the characters on the show I can say that this one is as close as it gets. Not only is the screenwriting and acting absolutely top notch, but the photography and the editing style as well as "dramaturgy" also is. Each episode is very thought through making them extremely secure in style, form and content are completely united, absolutely remarkable achievement by Cilla Jackert and the others who made this.

The second season is even better than the first one!

Thank you Swedish television!

... How can we go one knowing that this will NEVER be released on DVD?! Well, just barely, to be honest. I discovered SPUNG halfway through the first season and got hooked from there on. The show follows 6 people during school as they party, drink, have sex, and try to figure out why life is so hard to figure out. It deals with real issues and gives a heart and soul to all those thaughts that you yourself had during you're years trying to get on with your life and your choices.

As mentioned before, this show will NEVER be seen on DVD or even VHS or TV (probably) for that matter. Mainly because the series uses such a bizarre amount of music (about 10 songs per episode at least) and the rights to all this would just be too expensive to ever get it released. In fact, the music is also so much of what made SPUNG "SPUNG", it was a real genuine feeling of youth, flowing through every show, but it didn't feel faked like Saved By The Bell (yeah, I know it's an understatement, but I couldn't think of anything else) or Beverly Hills, it was actually genuine. Real people, with real problems, really really depressed, happy, sad, in love, and f***ed up.

The acting was also amazing. Blended with a grainy and unique visual style (influenced perhaps by a dogmatic feel) the series uses a lot of coulor and high contrast imagery which really made it stand out from the rest of SVT's crappy shows.

So yada yada yada, you will probably never get to see this :(