A global pandemic has sewn division and distrust. Restrictions are in place as to where you can go and what you can purchase at the shops. Non-stop news updates become the norm. Disinfectant sprays are everywhere.

It all sounds a little 2020 but this is the starting point of The Fortress, a seven-part series which arrives on Viaplay in July. Set in 2037, nine years after a global pandemic seems to have spawned violent riots and natural disasters, the country of Norway has decided to shut itself off from the rest of the world.

“We must go our own way,” Prime Minister Grieg Amund Heyerdahl (Tobias Santelmann, looking every inch the statesman) announces via television broadcast. “From now on, Norway will be one hundred per cent self-sufficient.” And, in order to achieve this, he has built a wall preventing anyone from getting into the paradise he has aimed to create.

And Norway does look like paradise, here. Bergen, which features heavily in the first episode, is shown to have pretty multi-coloured houses nestled in amongst a verdant landscape. By contrast, the refugee camps we see are dark, grimy and overcrowded. It’s in one such camp that we are introduced to Charlie (Russell Tovey), his wife and their baby daughter, aptly named Hope. Father and daughter are granted special access to Norway but can he really leave his wife behind?

Back in Norway, Esther (Salome Emnetu) works for a government body to ensure that food supplies remain plentiful and untouched by whatever diseases lurk beyond the national border.

There are many narrative strands presented in the first episode but one thing is clear – the whole world is a pressure cooker. Even Norway, which is seemingly so separate from its ailing neighbours, has trouble brewing. Something strange is going on at the Patagonia fish farm (their main source of salmon) and there are protests in the form of the “No to the Wall” campaign. Esther and her friends even question if their news is “filtered” and, therefore, “fake”. Is the wider world really as bad as it’s made out to be?

As all these storylines converge, one thing is for sure – the pandemic setting is eerily familiar, lending The Fortress a strong sense of “Is this where we could have ended up?”. It’s an unsettling thought but one that the series is surely going to lean into.

Episode one does a really good job of setting up each of the characters so that we immediately get a sense of who they are and what their objectives are. As the characters all follow their own agendas – Heyerdahl to be re-elected; Charlie to be re-united with his wife; Esther to get to the bottom of the salmon farm mystery – questions of morality and ethics will come into play, especially with the backdrop of an ongoing refugee crisis.

Could you survive the end of the world? And what would it take for you to do so?

All seven episodes of The Fortress (each with a run time of 45 minutes) land on Viaplay in the USA and Canada from the July 16.