Following the recent and entirely unprecedented boom in global exports, Danish TV drama has become an unexpected ‘darling’of the international television industry and enjoyed widespread acclaim from international critics and audiences alike. Up until the late-2000s, Danish TV series were by and large only sold to Germany and other Nordic countries. However, after 2010, Danish TV series produced especially by the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, DR, have been exported on a truly global scale. Denmark’s transition towards becoming an international player is not only unprecedented and surprising but it has also been an extremely swift one that was initially provoked by the BBC’s decision to broadcast the first season of Forbrydelsen (The Killing, 2007–2012) in January 2011 on BBC4 (Jensen et al., 2016). After this critical ‘shop window’exposure, and during the course of only 5 years, Denmark went from being a relatively insignificant exporter of audiovisual content to punching markedly above its weight in the international market for television drama. With its small population and strong public service broadcasting tradition that has focused on the needs of domestic Danish audiences and issues of national interest and concern due to its political remit, the near global success of Denmark’s television industry over the last 5 years is not only unprecedented and swift, it is also impressive and interesting from a media scholarly perspective. Previous work on transnational audiovisual distribution and reception has repeatedly shown that non-Anglophone audiovisual content rarely exports outside its geo-linguistic region due to the perception that audiences in other regions would be far too culturally and linguistically removed (McFadyen et al., 2000; Pertierra and Turner, 2013; Sinclair, 2009; Straubhaar, 2007). As such, a public broadcaster from a relatively small nation lying at the Northern periphery of Europe with a language spoken by only 5.6 million people has created what we could indeed term a peripheral counterflow (Jensen, 2016) in many senses. Firstly, it is peripheral in a geographic sense; Denmark is by all intents and purposes on the geographic periphery of, if not the entire world, then at least the Global North. Secondly, Danish is also far from being a world language, such as Arabic, French, English, Mandarin, Spanish, Portuguese or another dominant lingua franca used by people around the world. Traditionally, the presence of dominant languages in