Synopsis
Peter Paul Muller (Morten Mathijsen) plays the Frank Underwood of Dutch politics. Morten Mathijsen is a man who seems born for his job, headed for a glorious future as prime minister. Then a murky secret from the past threatens to harm his reputation. The eight part thriller Morten is based on the trilogy of the same name by Anna Levander, the pseudonym of parliamentary reporter Dominique van der Heyde and author Annet de Jong. Directed by Emmy Award winning Jean van de Velde.
MORTEN centres on the main character Morten Mathijsen and the many women who make his private and political life increasingly complicated. Morten Mathijsen is an ambitious forty-something politician with fresh new ideas that can’t be easily classified as right or left. He is blessed with charisma, even sex appeal, and his ambitions don’t stop at being a member of the Second Chamber. He wants to become Prime Minister, but one with a lot of allure: a Kennedy, de Gaulle or even Putin… But he finds a lot of obstacles in his way. Female obstacles. His wife, Esther, is not the perfect first lady: she has been struggling with bipolar disorder for years. Also, his Gothic teenage daughter has recently started a small illegal business in pills and opiates. In his political life, Morten Mathijsen has to fight against both the shrewd Tilda Adema, leader of his own party, and the current prime minister Simone Versteeg. The help he gets from former classmate and now much praised communication coach, Evelien Bax, is getting him in trouble both politically and at home. And then there is the anonymous stalker who is blackmailing him. Not big sums of money, just a couple of hundred euros at a time. But why? What does this anonymous blackmailer, who goes by the name of @nightwatch, know about Morten’s past? Who is he? Or she? And who is Eva Laurillard, who apparently wrote a book about Morten Mathijsen’s escapades years ago at the villa Maison Neuf? However, Morten Mathijsen’s biggest threat comes from an unexpected enemy. A young woman working at a cleaning company, whose father drowned twenty years ago in the pool of a certain villa, applies for an internship with Morten Mathijsen’s party. Although she is called Kelly de Nooijer and she is from a working-class environment in The Hague,she pretends to be an eager political student called Marijn Flanders. She will prove to be more than just a thorn in his side.