(continued from Part 1)
Honorable Mention
Operation Sabre—A tight, taut Serbian series which recounts how a Prime Minister falls victim to gangsters. The series, set before the NATO bombing, is very pro-NATO intervention, but it does offer a brisk recounting of an investigation into the affair with the music, which quotes Mission Impossible, constantly throbbing in the background and keeping this tale—which recounts how a TV journalist and an ingenue mob member helped bring the scandal to light— humming. It’s the kind of ’70s Alan (The Parallax View) Pakula-type political thriller that has almost disappeared in the West (Max).
Dark Horse—A Danish series about how the sins and insecurities of a mother, who constantly packs up and flees, are visited on her daughter as she lands in a tiny Danish town and tries to accommodate herself to the school “hot” boy by cooking her mother’s ketamine, leading to disastrous results. A cautionary tale where the blame falls not on the daughter, but on the parent’s own persistent anxiety and neglect (Prime Video).
Blackout—A Korean series about a teen drunkard whose last high school binge may have resulted in the death of two girls. He cannot remember what happened because he drank so much, but his traces are all over a bloody scene that might have been the murder location. He is sent to prison, released ten years later, and now must confront his past and figure out who may have actually committed the crime in a town that hates him. A well-worn trope (Savage River, Back to Life, Rectify) but one that always, as here, produces an invigorating series that challenges the justice system (Disney+).
True Detective Season 4—This HBO anthology series, gone moribund for a couple of seasons, returns and exceeds the level of its first season with Jodie Foster as a disgruntled sidelined police officer in an Alaskan backwater who must cooperate with her Indigenous police partner, herself the victim of family trauma, to understand how a local plant is polluting not only the environment but also the people of this tundra which in the dead of winter is as pitch black as the heart of the corporate entity perpetuating the exploitation of the region (Max).
Get Millie Black—HBO in the U.S. and Channel 4 in Britain co-pro that in its female cop returned to Jamaica lays bare the class and racial antagonisms based around inequality which haunt the island as the lead character Millie and her trans brother/sister each struggle with their demons. The British cop from Scotland Yard is more Millie’s foe than her ally and she is told to beware the power London exerts on the island, a reminder of a persistent colonial relationship (Max).
Thou Shalt Not Steal—The 17-year-old female Indigenous lead in this Australian comedy/road series begins by noting the irony of the missionaries reciting the title commandment which she reckons is funny “coming from the Bible bashing bastards that stole our country.” Given that original sin, she is proud herself to come from a long line of thieves, as she breaks out of a reformatory to find her surrogate father Ringer who calls his horse over and declares proudly, “I stole him.” The series abounds with thieves and lowlifes mostly from the Anglo-Australian line and is held together by a remarkably natural and uninhibited performance by its lead, Sherry-Lee Watson (MUBI).
Everybody Still Hates Chris –Animated reboot of the original Chris Rock series that features most of the voices from the original. A true working-class African-American comedy set in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant in the 1970s. As the series show runner says, this is the neighborhood before it was gentrified and its inhabitants before they were indoctrinated with the mixed “joys” of the internet and social media. The Black father who is always at work and focused on saving money and the mother’s interactions at the beauty parlor highlight a perspective on African-American life still seldom seen on either the big or small screen (Apple TV).
Hightown—The final season opens with our cop heroine Jackie Quiñones passed out on the Provincetown beach after visiting a crack dealer and then suspecting she may have had a part in the demise of her female lover for the night. Jackie’s struggle to get herself right and pursue the actual murderer is the backbone of this series as well as her boss/partner Ray’s attempt to be something other than a crooked cop. The ending is disappointing but the journey is one well worth taking (Prime Video).
The Detective from Beledweyne—This series about the unofficial pairing of a brilliant cop from Somalia with a Swedish female detective unveils the blatant racism at work in Swedish society where no one can believe there is even a police force in Somalia. “The detective” is an immigrant who gets work in the deadly migrant job of scraping asbestos, with the female cop the only one who is aware of his skills. Somewhat mitigated by blatantly propagandistic Syrian villains indicating that the racism extends into the upper reaches of the television intelligentsia as well (Acorn TV).
The Man Who Died—Finnish series based on the old noir tale DOA, dead on arrival, about a mushroom exporter who someone has poisoned and who in the time remaining to him must find out who was trying to kill him as well as following his inclination to pursue a fellow female mushroom aficionado as opposed to a wife who simply sees the entire enterprise as only for profit. Aptly charts the double dealing around all businesses and here the food processing biz with a Japanese importing company beset by its own double dealings (YouTube).
Sugar—A tried and true post neo-noir in the Chinatown mode that, given its blatant quoting of the tropes of the genre, shouldn’t work as well as it does. The Colin Farrell character’s mix of violence (“I don’t’ like hurting people” before he does) and sympathy, in one case for a stray dog he picks up off the street, is compelling as are his and the show’s constant references to the crime movies of the ’40s and the trafficking plot that updates The Big Sleep-type gangster activity (Apple TV).
Lady in the Lake—Crossing of two women struggling to be free in the patriarchal, racialized Baltimore of 1966 has the African-American woman narrating, but from beyond the grave in this Apple TV+ series based on a novel and reflecting the company’s attempt to outdo HBO at their own high culture game. Cleo, a skilled accountant, is trying to get out from under a local mobster in the numbers racket, and budding journalist Maddie is trying to get out from under the rigid control of her Jewish ancestry and husband. Both achieve a degree of autonomy but in the end Maddie’s mother’s announcing of Jewish acceptance into the mainstream— “They’re letting us in”—takes place next to a sign allowing “No Blacks.” As Maddie says in writing Cleo’s story, in another time they could have been friends, though the unequal position with Maddie achieving some measure of success and Cleo dead indicates the perhaps still unbridgeable gap between them. (Apple TV+).
Good Girl’s Guide to Murder—Most straightforward good and evil series from the BBC, without their usual waffling, illustrating the racism at the heart of British society and recalling earlier teen series gems like Veronica Mars. Pip’s investigation of a cold case killing of a young teen is aided by the supposed murderer’s Arab brother in a town where the alleged murderer’s ethnic origin is taken as proof of his guilt but where Pip traces the guilt instead to a pillar of the community. In its steadfast teen in pursuit of a truth adults won’t face, it recalls a forgotten Apple series Home Before Dark (Netflix).
The Investigations of Lolita Lobosco—The heart of this series is its embeddedness in the Southern Italian city of Bari, the second most populous town in the area next to Naples. Detective Lolita embodies the spirit of the region in her warmth and generosity and also in the way her feelings and intuition guide her “investigations,” foremost and most revealing among them being that of finding who killed her father and clearing his memory, a perilous undertaking that in Season 2 sheds light on the fallaciousness of her romantic interest and renews her own independent spirit (Amazon Prime).
Retro (Older series to find and watch)
Gogol—This Russian series from 2017 bewitchingly weaves the Russian 19th-century writer’s short stories from Evenings from a Farm Near Dikanka into a tale of murder and intrigue, with the Russian writer, turned detective in trying to bring to justice a mystical murderous horseman, as the glue on which to attach various strands of the stories. More famous for his Kafkaesque laying bare of the insidious banality of bureaucracy in “The Nose” and “The Overcoat,” this series instead mines the Ukrainian peasant folk tales that the writer-anthropologist unearthed and that in their horror and bloodthirstiness, well captured in the series, make the Brothers Grimm look like Harry Potter (Amazon Prime).
NY-LON —2004 British Channel 4 series that appears to slavishly follow the dictates of the rom-com, until it doesn’t. There is the “meet cute” between a London banker and a New York artist, the travails of a long-distance, in this case trans-Atlantic, relationship, which should eventually result in their overcoming the obstacles and finally uniting as a couple. The wonderful thing about this series is that doesn’t happen. The artist realizes that though he is personally a nice guy, her banker-boyfriend’s values do not correspond to hers and so she lets him go in an ethical breach of a genre which was never followed but which stands as a model of how, as Freud says, “reality sometimes intervenes and cures the neurosis.” As is so often the case, though seldom acknowledged, in the romantic comedy, not love but money conquers all. Except in this case it doesn’t (Tubi).
5 Worst
Máxima—Billed as “The Crown but in the Netherlands,” this series about an Australian investment banker working in New York who slowly falls for a Dutch prince is not a rags-to-riches but rather a rich-to-richer tale. It asks the poignant question, “Can a girl from the 10 percent ever really be happy with a boy from the 1 percent?” The opening teaser, supposedly the most dramatic moment of the series, has the banker screaming at her royal mate, “You’re telling me my father can’t come to the wedding?” It’s all downhill from there (Prime Video).
The Source—This French police series, titled Ourika in French, views the 2005 uprising in the banlieue or Parisian ghetto from the point of view of a rookie cop and his gangster brother, turning the protest of a people who are the constant victims of French state neglect into a trite mob tale. Disgusting elitist claptrap (Amazon Prime).
Fiasco—French production about a fledgling director whose adventures on the set go horribly wrong. As so often happens with French humor, the series punches neither up—that is, at the power structure financing the film, in this case Netflix—nor (thankfully) down, at the crew, but rather sideways at the foibles of the “well-meaning” director. The fiasco is not only in the unimaginative movie within a movie production but also in the meager attempt at satire-less humor. TV biz satire is done much better, pointedly, and with actual humor by The Larry Sanders Show and the underrated Episodes.
Soviet Jeans—Latvian series set in Riga in the 1970s whose hero, presented as a rebel, is a petty crook on the lookout for Blue Jeans and Walkmans, which to him signify freedom in a heavily regulated and surveilled society. The problem here is the alternative to an oppressive state is the commercial detritus of market capitalism (MUBI).
After the Party—New Zealand show starring Brit Commonwealth stalwarts Peter Mullen and Robyn Malcolm in a series where Malcolm’s rude, offensive, and self-righteous schoolteacher is gaslighted by Mullen’s on-the-surface endearing ex-husband. The problem is that the Malcolm character is not just a difficult woman—we’ve seen that before and it often works— but rather a domineering one who is right at every turn even as she attempts to control her students. A supposed criticism of patriarchy instead manifests as neoliberal, out-of-touch, smugness in the Madeleine Albright/Hillary Clinton/Kamala Harris mold (Netflix).
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