Halloween shows offer dystopian fare
Paramount+ imports the South Korean thriller “Bargain.” The five-episode series follows one grim scenario after another.
Young men are lured to a remote country resort where they assume they will enjoy an illicit encounter with a schoolgirl. But soon the tables are turned. Rather than face “Dateline”-type exposure as predators, they are bound and gagged and become victims themselves of traffickers who auction off their bodily organs in a motel room.
And just when you think you’ve seen the worst, a natural disaster strikes, stranding traffickers, victims and customers in a battle for survival.
This may be a gruesome metaphor for societal decline in a hostile climate, but individual viewers will have to decide if they find it entertaining. Based on a short 2015 Korean film with the same title.
› Another harrowing tale, the 2023 film “The Mill” streams on Hulu, following a worried husband (Lil Rel Howery), who wakes up inside a stone mill where he is forced to push a giant wheel or face termination.
› Fans of murdermystery procedurals with a little pizazz might enjoy the second season of “Harry Wild,” streaming on Acorn. Of course, some of us watch such series to avoid pizazz in the first place.
Jane Seymour stars in the title role as a retired literary professor at loose ends who enters a second career as a crime solver with the help of an unlikely partner and much younger man, Fergus Reid (Rohan Nedd). Harry’s habit of invoking literary references sail right over Fergus’ head.
“Harry” features the kind of “cute” situations and loud, obvious, insistent music that tends to announce that it’s somehow hip, and not the mild distraction that mystery buffs tend to enjoy.
Seymour, a veteran of decades of films and series, does not want this to be confused with a late-career “Murder, She Wrote,” retread. After all, she’s already been Dr. Quinn, medicine woman.
› The “Independent Lens” (10 p.m., PBS, TV-14, check local listings) documentary “El Equipo” follows the unlikely collaboration between an American anthropologist and students in Argentina whom he trains in forensic science to examine the bones of the many victims of Argentina’s “dirty War” against domestic opposition in the 1970s and
’80s, in the aftermath of decades of Peronist rule.
Each skeleton exhumed and examined builds a case against a regime that waged a terrorist war on its own people — and offers some solace to the families of victims who vanished some four decades ago.