COVER STORY
RIDE UPON THE STORM*
DENMARK WP/ALL4 (2 SERIES, 2017-)11
Lars Mikkelsen leads an
ensemble cast of Danish
superstars as a truly terrible priest in
this Church of Denmark drama from
the creator of Borgen, Adam Price.
Mikkelsen’s Johannes Krogh, below,
is a philandering alcoholic
misogynist whose wife leaves him
for another woman and whose sons
rebel with tragic consequences. He
is fascinating as a patriarch
desperate to continue
family tradition.
Iuzzolino describes
it as the pinnacle
of Scandi
sophistication.12
The Sicilian gangland wars
of the late 1970s may seem
an unlikely backdrop for a
coming-of-age comedy. Yet this
pulls it off, with an arch, funny
child’s-eye view of family and
young love, albeit one
equally concerned
with the
falsehood of
nostalgia and
the grim reality
of living
cheek-by-jowl
with the
Cosa
Nostra.13
Hailed for its non-judgmental
portrait of ordinary day-to-day
living within a strictly Orthodox
Jerusalem family, this award-
winning Israeli series arrived on
Netflix in 2018. Warm-hearted and
multilayered, it found its biggest
audience in the past two years,
as we all learnt to appreciate the
joy and pain of a close-knit
existence. “Each
character is so well
drawn you want
to scream at
them, but you
also love them,”
Baker says. A
US remake is
in the works.MY BRILLIANT FRIEND* ITALY
SKY/NOW (2 SERIES, 2018-)BABYLON BERLIN* GERMANY
SKY/NOW (3 SERIES, 2017-)8
The rich, delicate and graceful
adaptation of the author Elena
Ferrante’s Neapolitan saga traces
the intense and twisted friendship
between Lenù and Lila over six
decades. Superb performances
by the child actors Elisa del Genio,
as Lenù, and Ludovica Nasti, as Lila,
in the first season are matched by
the adult performers Margherita
Mazzucco and Gaia Girace,
below, in the
second and
forthcoming
third. My Brilliant
Friend is an
exceptionally
beautiful show.7
Set in the degenerate twilight of
1929 Berlin, this adaptation of
Volker Kutscher’s Weimar detective
novels inhabits a strange, fabulous
world somewhere between the
dapper decadence of Boardwalk
Empire and the tubercular
nightmare of Fassbinder’s Berlin
Alexanderplatz. Directed by Tom
Tykwer (who made Run Lola Run),
the mood is consumptive and
terrifying as the shell-shocked
police inspector Gereon Rath
(Volker Bruch) and his aspirant
partner Charlotte Ritter (Liv Lisa
Fries) wade into a foul underworld
conspiracy of Soviet agents, grubby
pornographers and police
corruption.THE BUREAU* FRANCE
AMAZON (5 SERIES, 2015-)9
The show that does for spies
what The Sopranos did for
mobsters and The Wire did for cops.
Deeks describes it as “a compelling,
complex and realistic, slow-burn
French espionage drama”. Based in
the DGSE, France’s MI6, it unpicks
the grim world of spycraft:
a stressed-out and sloppily
dressed group of flawed
people (including
Mathieu Kassovitz,
right) making
irrational decisions
with complex,
believable
situations. “It’s
instantly addictive,”
Frostrup says.10
From its opening shot — a
yelping Pomeranian dog
falling off a Mumbai tower block
and landing next to a group of
screaming schoolgirls — Netflix’s
first Hindi-language production
feels like nothing you’ve seen
before. It’s a gangland drama
centring on a jaded Sikh police
officer attempting to track
down a vicious crime
lord with crazed plans to
destroy Mumbai. Yet
beyond the escalating
thrill of the chase lies
a complex drama
about race, religion,
myth and destiny in
modern India.BABYLON BERLIN*
THE BRIDGE* SWEDEN/DENMARK
AMAZON (4 SERIES, 2011-18)4
It’s ten years since the discovery
of a bisected corpse on the
bridge linking Malmo with
Copenhagen, in season one of Hans
Rosenfeldt’s Nordic noir, introduced
us to Sofia Helin’s blunt Swedish
homicide detective Saga Noren,
below, and Kim Bodnia’s disorderly
Danish cop Martin Rohde. In that
time there have been grisly sequels
and lesser remakes, but nothing has
captured the invention
of those first two
seasons, which
turned the police
procedural into a
character study of
two damaged
souls.BORGEN* DENMARK
NETFLIX (3 SERIES, 2010-)5
For most of 2012 and 2013 the
knotty political travails of the
prime minister Birgitte Nyborg
(Sidse Babett Knudsen, below)
gripped a small but passionate
cluster of the British viewing public.
There were no frozen corpses or
mismatched detective teams here;
simply complex, engaging human
drama and, as the UK
suffered through the
Tory/Lib Dem
coalition, politicians
you actually cared
about. “It’s one of the
of the best and
boldest Danish series
ever made,” Iuzzolino
says. And it returns
later this year.6
Adapted by the author Roberto
Saviano from his undercover
investigations into the Italian crime
organisation the Camorra, this taut,
brutal, labyrinthine series follows
its ruthless antiheroes, the cold-
hearted Ciro (Marco D’Amore) and
hotheaded Genny (Salvatore
Esposito, right), as they
battle for control of
Naples. “A realistic
portrait of the
Neapolitan criminal
underworld,” Deeks
says. The Naples
mayor claimed that
violent crime
escalated when an
episode was aired.
*SHTISEL*LA MAFIA UCCIDE SOLO D’ESTATE
*RIDE UPON THE STORM
*SACRED GAMES
*LE BUREAU DES LÉGENDES
*GOMORRAH
*L’AMICA GENIALE
*BORGEN
BRON*
SHTISEL* ISRAEL
NETFLIX (3 SERIES, 2013-21)SACRED GAMES* INDIA
NETFLIX (2 SERIES, 2018-19)GOMORRAH* ITALY
SKY/NOW (5 SERIES, 2014-21)THE MAFIA ONLY KILLS
IN SUMMER* ITALY
WP/ALL4 (2 SERIES, 2016-18)6 6 February 2022