110 Time February 15/February 22, 2021
TELEVISION
A whole world
worth watching
By Judy Berman
ForgeT The Undoing. TV’s besT mariTal Thriller in
years is Losing Alice, a psychologically rich drama about a
filmmaker, her actor husband and the young writer who
wants them to bring her first screenplay to life. It premiered
on Apple TV+ in January, to little fanfare, and I’ve been talk-
ing it up ever since.
It’s a shame the show hasn’t gotten more buzz, but the fact
that Americans have a chance to see it at all is worth celebrat-
ing. In Hebrew with English subtitles, Alice comes to us from
Israel—it’s the kind of title that once struggled to find a home
in the States. While generations of Americans have had access
to British period dramas on PBS, Canadian teen soaps on cable
and other Anglophone imports, traditional TV shied away
from subtitled fare. But the rise of streaming in the early 2010s
remade the television landscape. Amid plenty of troubling
consequences for the industry, the vast catalog of foreign-
language shows now available in the U.S. via streaming plat-
forms might be the best side effect of the new paradigm.
The reasons for this influx are many. While over-the-air
broadcasters and cable companies served geographically or
linguistically distinct audiences, streaming was built to scale.
Netflix, whose first exclusive offering was bilingual Norwe-
gian import Lilyhammer, is currently available in more than
190 countries. In addition to licensing shows and movies in
dozens of languages, it now produces them; last year, the
service launched its first African original, the multilingual
Queen Sono. Multinational conglomerates like AT&T subsid-
iary HBO Max have stocked their freshly launched streaming
Stories from
faraway
lands
illuminate
the blind
spots in our
perspectivesservices with programming from in-
ternational sister stations. Peacock has
shows from corporate parent Comcast’s
Spanish- language property Telemundo.So far, the internationalization of TV
has been a resounding success. Netf-
lix announced in January that Lupin—a
propulsive crime drama that reimagines
the classic French “gentleman thief ”
as a Senegalese immigrant plotting to
avenge his late father—was on track to
reach more viewers than Bridgerton or
The Queen’s Gambit. And as a vital part
of the long-tail economy that is Peak
TV, shows from abroad have won over
Americans who’ve dropped cable and
now stuff their streaming queues with
romantic Korean dramas or chilly Nor-
dic thrillers or kinetic Japanese anime.
What has made Americans—who are
notorious for failing to learn second lan-
guages and for avoiding subtitled films—
embrace this stuff? For one thing, with
megacorps like Disney pouring funds
into TV-development strategies driven
by existing franchises, foreign- language
television is starting to feel like a refuge
from brainless big- budget Hollywood
spectacles. (It probably also has to do
with the English dubbing that Netflix,
among others, makes default.)
Yet even dubbed versions have some-
thing unique to offer. Scripted series
aren’t documentaries, of course. But
they do reflect cultural norms; they cap-
ture how people halfway around the
world talk about politics, work or love.
German period dramas like Netflix’s
Babylon Berlin and Cold War thriller
Deutschland 83, streaming on Hulu,
suggest how that country has processed
a dark 20th century. Gomorrah, a gritty
gangster saga on HBO Max, explores the
Italian criminal- justice system.
On top of the many benefits good art
bestows on its beholders, stories from
faraway lands illuminate the blind spots
in our perspectives. In a country where
provincialism too often metastasizes into
nationalism, at a time when international
travel is virtually impossible, the best
thing our screens can do is open us up to
the world beyond them. □TimeOff Reviews
◁
The troubled psyche of a filmmaker (Ayelet
Zurer) fills the frame in thriller Losing Alice