Linda Saarniluoto (Laura Malmivaara) begins her descent into crime with a simple act of denial. A successful Helsinki real estate agent, single and in her 40s, accustomed to luxury, status, and predictability, she wakes one morning to find her husband gone, along with her financial stability.
Writer-director Tiina Lymi constructs a moral fable camouflaged as a darker crime dramedy in her latest series Queen of Fucking Everything, following Linda’s steady reconfiguration from victim to perpetrator, from professional respectability to criminal competence. The six-part Finnish series traces how social façades, much like real estate itself, are built on fragile foundations. As Linda clings to appearances while slipping into theft, fraud, and into more illicit territory, the series follows her transformation.
Lymi, known for her measured yet emotionally articulate storytelling (Mother of Mine, Happier Times, Grump), returns here to her recurring preoccupation: the fragility of self-image under social pressure. Across her work, she frequently isolates her protagonists at the moment when an established order, family, social, or psychological, fractures.
Where her earlier works framed that collapse through interpersonal drama or generational conflict, Queen of Fucking Everything externalizes it into the architecture of crime. The shift from upper-middle-class Helsinki interiors to the industrial peripheries of its underworld becomes a physical expression of the protagonist's fall and her attempt to return.
The series leans more into satire. Its tone oscillates between the procedural precision of white-collar crime and a detached absurdity. Lymi refrains from sensationalizing Linda’s actions. The storyline instead mirrors her internal logic, one in which necessity justifies the transgressions.
Lymi’s structural approach mirrors Linda’s double life. Each episode layers the narrative along two temporal and moral axes: the maintenance of her façade in the real estate world and the expansion of her operations in the criminal one to enable the façade to continue.
When Linda’s husband disappears, leaving her burdened with debt, shattered ambitions, and few remaining possessions, she struggles to maintain composure at her job selling luxury apartments. With her bank account frozen and no access to funds, she finds herself to scavenging for empty cans on a street and gets in fight with a homeless man. As she adapts to this sudden economic downfall, Linda begins to devise a contingency plan to sustain herself until her husband’s disappearance, and their unresolved financial situation, are clarified.
As a last resort, Linda reconnects with her childhood friend Marke (Katja Küttner), whom she had long regarded with quiet embarrassment during their occasional encounters. Marke lives just above the poverty line but radiates an unshakable optimism and zest for life. In contrasting these two women, director Lymi ventures into territory reminiscent of British social dramedies such as Paul Abbott’s Shameless.
This encounter propels Linda out of her comfort zone and into increasingly precarious circumstances, including a gradual descent into petty crime. Queen of Fucking Everything thus shifts in tone, evolving into a Finnish female version of Breaking Bad, albeit with a more satirical edge.
Lymi crafts a sympathetic anti-heroine in Linda, who clings to the remnants of her former life while showing a willingness to soil her hands to protect it. As time runs out and the truth threatens to surface, Linda faces the possibility of losing everything she once had.
Lymi mines these circumstances for darkly comic moments, most notably in a hospital scene where Linda’s furious outburst at her seemingly dying, estranged mother is misread by staff as an emotional breakdown of a devoted daughter. The irony deepens when it becomes clear that the only reason Linda still has a roof over her head is that her apartment is legally owned by her mother. Her mother’s death would, quite literally, make her homeless.
Queen of Fucking Everything weaves together several thematic threads, including a tongue-in-cheek take on the adage that “a friend in need is a friend indeed,” alongside Linda’s gradual transformation and her double life as a real estate agent by day and an increasingly resourceful criminal by night.
The series follows in the wake of other female-centered shows unafraid to broach taboo subjects, such as MILF of Norway. Yet while Lymi’s work also revolves around an unconventional anti-heroine, it opts for darker humor rather than overt social commentary.
Lymi makes full use of the medium’s freedom to explore transgressive behavior while maintaining a sardonic distance. The series even has a “Chuck Palahniuk moment” involving a severed finger, underscoring its penchant for grotesque, gross and darkly comic situations as Linda pushes the limits of what she is willing to do to preserve the life she once had.