Jan Stenbeck Was the Swedish Murdoch

The legacy of Jan Stenbeck and what he did to the Kinnevik Group looms large over Swedish culture in particular and the financial world at large. Ironically, despite Stenbeck developing the corporate template that Rupert Murdoch used to become the dominant media mogul in the English-speaking world, he’s an obscure figure beyond those two contexts. With Vanguard (titled Stenbeck in some markets), FLX — itself a production company that could only have existed thanks to Stenbeck — is now giving the rest of us an idea of just who he was with a ViaPlay premiere in United States on December 9.

Jan Stenbeck is the corporate heir who privatized Swedish telecoms. He was directly responsible for Swedish television moving from a publicly funded model to the hollow commercial programming we take for granted in the United States. There’s an irony that Vanguard is an artistic tragic work rather than a salacious biopic given that Stenbeck himself did everything he could destroy the idea of television as serving a greater pedagogic or aesthetic service.

Unfortunately, Vanguard itself doesn’t have much appreciation of this irony. While Rupert Murdoch is the main analog for what the real Stenbeck did, William Randolph Hearst is Stenbeck’s spiritual predecessor in the series, as it more or less does for Jan Stenbeck what Citizen Kane did for Hearst. We start out with the bubbly, excitable Jan in New York City circa 1975 doing his very best to sell investors from the Middle East on the idea of cellular phones, as wireless markets will soon open up in the United States.

In between Jan’s charming business deals, he romances Merrill McLeod, an American divorcee who quickly becomes the love of his life: the Rosebud he slowly loses as the series moves forward. As Jan takes control of the family business, the Kinnevik Group, something which Vanguard presumes he never expected or wanted to do in the first place, he awkwardly splits his time between jet-setting business deals centered in Sweden and his family back in the United States.

Vanguard doesn’t really get into the implications of Jan effectively Americanizing the Swedish market as it chooses rather to focus on Jan’s tragic, pathetic love story. And, in all fairness, Jan himself doesn’t really seem to care about the political or social ramifications of his actions. His main motivation is his, ultimately vindicated, belief that the business of telecommunications will make the Kinnevik Group outrageously rich: the rewards would be well worth the effort and risks of challenging Sweden’s existing public television model.

The marketing for Vanguard compares it to Succession, and while this isn’t wrong, it rather understates the motivations of the various members of the Stenbeck family. They care less who controls the company and more what the company does. Kinnevik was originally dedicated to the production of steel and lumber, and Jan’s crazy idea to transition to telecommunications completely changes their business model. Instead of being the anchor of Sweden’s then-production based manufacturing economy, complete with company towns, Kinnevik’s value becomes vast but intangible. Over the course of the series, Kinnevik stops even the pretense of making quality products and focuses on its control over telecommunications. It drives out competition by making aggressive use of low-brow programming to make television sexy and exciting, in contrast to the more socially substantive news and issues-related programs of public broadcasting.

Vanguard obliquely acknowledges that Jan Stenbeck angered a lot of people. It does so, smartly, with scenes of protest that dwindle as over time he becomes so wealthy as to be essentially untouchable. But, for the most part his main conflict is with his older sister Margaretha, a politician who was passed over for Kinnevik leadership mainly because she was a woman. The portrayal of gender in Vanguard is a layered irony all of its own. Old Sweden, as represented by the patriarchal Stenbeck family, isn’t just driving Kinnevik into a ditch by naively insisting the company focus on making tangible products. It’s also mean to the Stenbeck daughters, never taking them seriously despite both having advanced business educations comparable to Jan’s. This gives the false impression that Jan’s attempts to Americanize Sweden are at least well-meaning, less an Americanization intended to placate the gods of Wall Street and more a modernization intended to bring the Nordic region out of the dark ages.

It’s the kind of message that’s plausible enough for the Swedish market from which Vanguard originates, although the fetishization of the United States as a land of greater gender equality may strike American viewers as a little odd, given that we generally invert that impression — on the rare occasion any of us think of Sweden at all. There’s something likewise disturbing about the fact that, in the United States, Jan lives in a large, idealized, sunny American style home with his wife and kids. Contrast this with the comparably grotesque Swedish estate, especially as it appears in the final episode. By dedicating his life to the Americanization of Swedish media, Jan ironically makes it impossible for himself to live the idealized American life that made him think any of this was a good idea in the first place.

Stenbeck doesn’t even have an Ozymandias style monument to his name: no legacy, no tributes. None of the other international telecommunication moguls who stole his playbook saw him as anything other than a competitor. Stenbeck turned Sweden into another petty fiefdom for the global American media landscape, an American culture he loved both for its business models as well as for his beautiful wife.

And what thanks did Stenbeck get for his work as a cultural ambassador? None at all. In transforming Sweden, he lost his wife, and who knows whether either Sweden or the Kinnevik group was better off for his career? Ultimately, Vanguard is more the story of Jan’s tragedy than Stenbeck’s accomplishment. Whether the real Jan Stenbeck deserves as much sympathy as Vanguard gives him remains an open question.