New shows from abroad fill in American production

OPINION

Among the things the covid-19 pandemic has taken away from us, at least temporarily, new American-made television series are not the most important. But the paucity of domestic scripted shows premiering is striking.

Yet there are fresh comedies and dramas arriving from countries where they were made before the virus struck. The majority are British, continuing a trend that began as a small stream with the launch lineups of HBO Max and Peacock and is turning into a cross-Atlantic tsunami as summer progresses. Some highlights: “Hitmen,” Peacock. Imagine Laverne and Shirley as a pair of working-class contract killers and you’ve got the idea of this comedy. Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins, the original hosts of “The Great British Bake Off,” play Jamie and Fran, who approach their violent occupation with the enthusiasm and professionalism of shelf-stockers at a bigbox store.

The broad humor often takes place while the hit women sit in their van with a trussed-up victim, waiting for instructions from their unseen employer. Much of the fun comes from the actors playing the testy targets, including Jason Watkins of “The Crown” as a crooked lawyer.

“In My Skin,” Hulu. Bethan (Gabrielle Creevy), the Welsh teenager at the center of this gently barbed coming-of-age story, is a full-time fabulist. She feeds friends and teachers a diet of haute-bourgeois lies because she’s mortified by the sad, dangerous reality of life with her bipolar mom and drunk dad.

While she’s spinning a stable, prosperous home environment as a smokescreen, she’s writing derivative proletarian verses for her high school literary anthology.

The lies begin to catch up with her, partly because she’s distracted by a popular female classmate (Zadeiah Campbell-Davies). But across the five episodes — written by Kayleigh Llewellyn and directed by Lucy Forbes — happily smutty dark humor and light melancholy mostly win out over maudlin life lessons. The distinctively British mix of winsome-glum kitchen-sink drama and sitcom beats is helped by Creevy’s alert, understated performance. “Endeavour,” PBS. This prequel series, a fixture of PBS’ “Masterpiece,” is creeping closer in time to “Inspector Morse,” the British mystery from which it was spun off. The seventh season of “Endeavour” is set in 1970, within hailing distance of the 1987 advent of “Morse.” As the shows converge, the notion that the stern young detective Endeavour Morse played by Shaun Evans in the current series is going to age into the paunchy, sardonic, thoroughly modern misanthrope played by John Thaw in the original is becoming hard to entertain.

Evans’ formal, awkward Morse is fine in its own right, and “Endeavour” shares the original’s pensive, almost mournful atmosphere. The new three-episode season carries on storylines from Season 6 that find Morse increasingly at odds with his boss and mentor, Fred Thursday (Roger Allam), as the case of the killer haunting the towpaths of Oxford’s canals refuses to stay solved. The racism and sexism of the time figure into other homicides, and the indignities of aging and Morse’s latest disastrous love affair contribute to the generally downbeat tone.

“The Other One,” Acorn TV. This series about two half-sisters who discover each other when their father dies belongs to a genre, the life-force comedy. But the show’s creator, Holly Walsh (“Motherland”), deftly undercuts the inherent sentimentalities of her story, even as the supremely uptight Cathy (Ellie White) and the raucous, free-spirited Cat (Lauren Socha) predictably overcome their differences and form a new family blended from emotional openness and cheap white wine run through a SodaStream.

White is entirely convincing as the anxious and controlling but big-hearted Cathy, and she’s ably supported in the first season’s seven episodes by Socha and a pair of scene-stealing veterans, Rebecca Front and Siobhan Finneran, as the dead man’s furious wife and his dizzy, agoraphobic mistress. “We Hunt Together,”

Showtime. In this lurid melodrama, everyone is damaged, from the former child soldier to the brainy phone-sex worker to the frighteningly rigid cop.

Eve Myles (“Torchwood”) and Babou Ceesay (“Into the Badlands”) play the latest variation on mismatched partners — her the all-business sergeant, him the empathetic, higher-ranking detective brought in from internal affairs. Myles and Ceesay are fairly engaging, but they’re only half the story: Equal time, and nearly equal sympathy, is given to the Bonnie-andClyde killers played by Hermione Corfield and Dipo Ola. The murder-for-love plotline may not hold water, but everyone involved is fun to watch.