'Seaside Hotel' Season 10 Debuts on PBS Passport In Time for Summer

Walter Presents (initially called Walter's Choice) came to PBS Passport in 2019 to help fill out the nascent member-based streaming offering, which was the shiny new thing those who support their local stations received along with a mug and tote bag. However, the PBS national brand didn't market it, leaving the local PBS stations, who also didn't push it, uncertain if American viewers would like the U.K. anthology equivalent of Masterpiece, bringing the best of European programming to British audiences, since the shows were in their original languages. It left the shows within it to find audiences organically, the first of which was Seaside Hotel (Badehotellet), and which remains one of Walter Presents most popular series.

A Danish period piece about a summer hotel in Skagerrak, an area just south of Skagen, Seaside Hotel's first season was set in the late 1920s in the interwar period, as wealthy Europeans escape the growing unrest going on in the heart of the continent. Every season begins with the start of the summer tourist season as the annual guests arrive; Seasons 1 through 5 covered from 1928 through 1932 when The Weimar Republic began to collapse. The show then jumped forward to World War II in Season 6, picking back up in 1939. Season 9, which aired in Denmark in the spring of 2023, and arrived on PBS Passport in November, was set in the summer of 1945 and the conclusion of the war.

Season 10 picks up in the summer of 1946 as the post-war economic collapse has taken hold and the first wave of new technology out of America is heading across the pond.