The inside story of Nokia’s rise and fall is being made into a TV series

A TV series will trace the dramatic story of how Nokia went from being the biggest mobile phone manufacturer to an unremarkable also-ran in just a few years.

Nokia was once the biggest mobile phone company in the world, before stumbling and losing its crown after being surpassed by its rivals. Now, according to Variety, there’s a TV series in the works that will tell the story of this corporate blunder in dramatic fashion. Under the working title of Mobile 1.0, the Finnish and English language series will start from the very early years of the brand’s emergence, in 1988-1990.

From there, the Finnish electronics brand soon amassed a reputation for making mobile phones that were reliable and robust, seemingly to the point of near-indestructability. However the manufacturer itself turned out not to be quite as resilient as the famous 3310 handset, and when smartphones became the next big thing it was bought up by Microsoft, whose struggle to overturn Android or Apple in this sector led to Nokia relinquishing its throne to the likes of Samsung.

You may wonder how a story of this nature would ever become a hit TV show, but there are a few examples of esoteric tech stories that have managed to capture the attention of those outside of the bubble, such as Pirates of Silicon Valley, and more recently David Fincher’s The Social Network or Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs have also brought the technology sagas of recent decades to a wider audience.

The series’ cast is composed mainly of Finnish stars, including Satu-Tuuli Karhu, Emil Kihlström, and Aku Sipola, while the story will be told from the perspectives of lawyers and developers as well as the big beasts in the boardroom. Reportedly created following extensive research and interviews, this could give us an interesting and exciting perspective into what makes or breaks a giant company.

The producer Minna Haapkylä said about the project: “Nokia is a national treasure but also a huge global brand. The series unfolds as an epic story of how a small Finnish town and a small Finnish company grew to become the home of biggest mobile phone supplier in the world, and one that changed literally all our lives.”