A TV grand tour, from around the world
Even in these boom times for television imports, it’s an unusual bounty.
Five noteworthy international series, from Britain, France, Israel and Italy, have just arrived on American streaming services. Also of note: In contrast to any five American shows you might choose at random, they are all contemporary dramas set in recognizable everyday reality, with no superheroes or extraterrestrial bounty hunters, although one is focused on gangsters and another holds out the possibility that ghosts exist.
“Call My Agent!” The fourth and final season of this show-business dramedy, arriving three months after its debut in France, exhibits both the smooth craftsmanship and the underpinning of sentimentality, about life and the movies, that have made it a cult favorite in America. (All those Parisian locations don’t hurt, either.)
The regular cast, playing the agents and assistants at a highpowered but fragile talent agency, is highly adept at delivering the show’s not always sidesplitting Gallic humor; Camille Cottin, as the firm’s harried lead partner, and Nicolas Maury, as the most vivid of the assistants, are particularly amusing.
The show’s masterstroke, though, is its weekly casting of guest stars from the French film world, who play hapless or imperious versions of themselves with varying degrees of skill but always evident enthusiasm. (Netflix)
“Flack.” Anna Paquin steams like a dreadnought through this morbidly debauched satire of the public-relations business, whose first season was shown on the British pay-cable channel W in 2019. As Robyn, an American crisis-manager working for a London firm, she cleans up the messes of clueless athletes, entertainers and politicians with efficiency and blunt amorality, but she also lets us see glimmers of the actual human being trapped inside Robyn’s exoskeleton of insecurity and ambition. (Amazon Prime Video)
“Gomorrah.” For American viewers, it’s been a long wait, nearly four years, between seasons of this Neapolitan drug-gang epic, whose distribution was held up by the travails of the Weinstein Co. Season 3, which is finally arriving on HBO Max, was shown in Italy in late 2017.
Fans who find their way back will be rewarded with another elaborate storyline, across 12 episodes, tied to the tortured relationship between Ciro (Marco D’Amore) and Genny (Salvatore Esposito), whose bond endures even though Ciro pumped Genny full of lead at the end of Season 1. They join forces once again and find themselves being den mothers to a hungry young gang at the bottom of the criminal pecking order in Naples, a circumstance that jibes with the show’s penchants for junkstrewn locations and ragged formations of motorcycles.
(HBO Max)
“Losing Alice.” This eightepisode series written and directed by Sigal Avin (“#ThatsHarassment”), shown last summer on Israeli cable channel HOT, is an ambitious and sometimes absorbing attempt to do something a little different. Avin plays with the conventions of the psychosexual thriller and the backstage drama: Alice (Ayelet Zurer of “Munich”), a filmmaker who could use a hit, and her actor husband, David (Gal Toren), find themselves collaborating on a darkly erotic script by a young, seductive and possibly sinister writer, Sophie (Lihi Kornowski of “False Flag”).
(Apple TV+)
“The Sister.” Russell Tovey may be a gifted actor with an unusual capacity for exploring complex and layered human emotion, but he made his TV breakthrough playing a lonely werewolf (in the original “Being Human”). He dips into the supernatural again in this fourepisode British miniseries from writer Neil Cross, known for zooming right over the top in series like “Luther” and “Hard Sun.” (“The Sister” was shown on ITV in October.)
Cross is unusually subdued in this quiet thriller about a guilt-ridden husband (Tovey) who’s keeping a bigger-thanusual secret from his wife (Amrita Acharia); and yes, it involves the sister of the title, the wife’s younger sibling, who went missing a decade ago.