Stream It Or Skip It: ‘ABBA: Against The Odds’ on Netflix, A Doc About The Swedish Group’s Eurovision Victory And Resulting Pop Fame 

ABBA: Against The Odds (Netflix) travels back 50-plus years to 1974, when Sweden first gave ABBA to the world. A band of two couples, Agnetha Fȁltskog and Björn Ulvaeus and Anni-Frid “Frida” Lyngstad and Benny Andersson, ABBA represented their country in the annual Eurovision Song Contest, won it with “Waterloo,” and were suddenly the biggest thing going on the world pop music stage. Directed by James Rogan, ABBA: Against The Odds is a production of the BBC, which as a broadcaster of the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest – and its championship round in May – has an interest in supporting material that showcases the competition’s history. So if you want to know how Netherlands or Luxembourg or Greece voted in Eurovision 1974, it’s included in the archival footage used to create ABBA: Against All Odds. 

ABBA – AGAINST ALL ODDS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: “It’s a damp squib – it’s going to end. Tacky, plastic.” Leave it to the snippy British music press of the early 1970s to put a damper on ABBA’s success, just as they’d found it. Despite the haters, the quartet’s 24-point victory at Eurovision in ‘74 launched their onslaught on the marketplace for deceptively simple, effervescent tunes that anyone could sing along to, and by 1976, ABBA had scored early radio hits with “Waterloo,” “Mamma Mia,” and “Fernando,” and taken their flair for non gender-specific and outrageous flights of rayon, low-cut, or otherwise be-frilled outfits to media appearances throughout Europe and Australia. “Dancing Queen” followed – “When we recorded [it,],” Agnetha Fȁltskog says of that classic in Against The Odds, “both Frida and I, we got goosebumps” – and ABBA’s lasting identity as a pop group was set.

Against The Odds times its subject’s progression into the world’s consciousness by the penetration of their most famous songs. While Europe and Australia were early adopters of ABBA singles, America was an entirely separate challenge for the group, and when “Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight)” hit in 1979, its sound clashed with the racist and homophobic US backlash to disco typified by Disco Demolition Night. Punk music was climbing up to take space, too, which also put ABBA’s happy-go-lucky, sometimes plasticky material on a cultural back foot. But Against The Odds also looks at the internal workings of ABBA in the years after their initial success, when the changing tastes of the public and the music industry weren’t the only source of friction. Fȁltskog hated flying, there was friction between starting a family and remaining a pop star, and then the divorces came, putting more pressure on Ulvaeus and Fȁltskog and Frida Lyngstad and Benny Andersson to maintain ABBA as a professional, but no longer personal entity.

For this doc, it all goes back to Eurovision, and ABBA’s popularity in England. While the quartet never officially broke up, they were on hiatus by 1982, and Against The Odds uses footage from the group’s six-night stand at Wembley Arena in 1979, later released as a live album and DVD, as its concluding bookend. With the continued pop culture presence of their music, it feels like a doc with a fuller picture of the group’s music could still happen. But in the meantime, this one’s a giddy celebration of ABBA’s biggest early splashes, marked by catchy melodies and yard after yard of skintight blue satin.

Photo: Everett Collection

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Another BBC doc about ABBA does exist, The Joy of ABBA, and it’s available to stream on YouTube. In the recent docuseries Ace of Base: All That She Wants, the cycles of Swedish pop music history repeat in the 1990s with the meteoric rise of Ace of Base. And if you don’t know anything about the real-life Eurovision, let Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams – and a scene-stealing Dan Stevens – educate you in poptastic fun fashion with Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga.    

Performance Worth Watching: Archival footage makes up the entirety of ABBA: Against The Odds, but a few moments stand out. Like the group’s appearance on Polish television in 1976, a glittering representation of Western pop music, live from behind the Iron Curtain. Or the memorable shots from the first show ever on their 1977 Australian tour, where ABBA emerges in flurries of falling rain to the opening strains of “Tiger.” 

Memorable Dialogue: In the late 1970s, as ABBA’s popularity grew, journalist and author Viven Goldman says the band “seemed to project a relentless good cheer,” a cheeriness that was directly opposed to the forces represented in the rise of punk rock. “Punk came along,” Goldman continues, “overturning and turning its back on all that had come before.” 

Sex and Skin: None.

Photo: Everett Collection

Our Take: These days, the music of ABBA has fueled a Mamma Mia! jukebox musical that’s become an entire industry unto itself, and in London, you can even buy tickets to see digital avatars – “ABBAtars,” natch – perform the quartet’s songs at a Sphere-like purpose-built entertainment venue. So the durability of the band’s melodies is not in question, and ABBA themselves enjoy a kind of enduring fame detached from its physical upkeep. That detachment doesn’t necessarily change with ABBA: Against The Odds, since none of the interviews we hear are on-camera, it’s unclear whether the audio is new or repurposed from existing tapes, there is no outside commentary, and the doc doesn’t develop the kind of arcing narrative that would contextualize the quartet’s early experiences with what came later. 

So maybe it’s cool just to watch Against The Odds for the footage, because in that respect, it’s got a ton of visuals to offer. From the sparkly exploding star electric guitar played by Björn Ulvaeus for “Waterloo” at Eurovision – the provenance of this instrument is a topic for internet sleuths – to Frida Lyngstad and Agnetha Fȁltskog sporting fantabulous arrays of tight-fitting jumpsuits accentuated with wing-like fabric panels in every color of the seventies aesthetic rainbow, the six years of ABBA covered in Against The Odds are replete with incredible drip and era-specific equipment.  

Our Call: Stream It. It might not be the final, most complete word on its subject, but ABBA: Against The Odds accesses a grip of great-looking archival footage as it flows from the Swedish quartet’s big win at Eurovision in 1974 through a whirlwind few years of worldwide pop stardom.

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.