From across pond, 5 new shows to watch
Five noteworthy international series, from Britain, France, Israel and Italy, arrived on American streaming services in the past three days.
‘Call My Agent!’
The fourth and final season of this show-business dramedy, arriving on Netflix 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. The regular cast, playing the agents and assistants at a high-powered 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.
‘Flack’
Anna Paquin steams like a dreadnought through this morbidly debauched satire of the public-relations business, the first season of which was shown on the British pay-cable channel W in 2019 and comes to Amazon Prime. 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.
‘Gomorrah’
For American viewers, it has been a long wait, nearly four years, between seasons of this Neapolitan drug-gang epic, but Season 3 is finally arriving on HBO Max.
Fans who find their way back will be rewarded with another elaborate story line, 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 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 junk-strewn locations and ragged formations of motorcycles.
‘Losing Alice’
This eight-episode series on Apple TV+, written and directed by Sigal Avin (“#Thatsharassment”) and 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”).
‘The Sister’
This quiet thriller — shown on ITV in October and now streaming on Hulu — is about a guildridden husband (Russell Tovey) who’s keeping a bigger-than-usual 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.
The action dawdles and Tovey isn’t ideally cast, but there’s a touch of voluptuous dread in the atmosphere.