I used to acquire a cheap, churned out series of crime novels on Kindle…spy/crime sort of stuff, clearly not edited, because he constantly spelled the country Columbia, not Colombia. Columbia is a film studio and a number of US cities.
The Price of Glory seems to have a lot of chicas guapas too.
I watched the first episode of The Fox. Anne Füchs is the former Stasi agent, who was sacked by Stasi so avoids the worst of their terrible name after reunification. There are 9 episodes, but filmed over quite a few years. In the first case, she is asked to help find a missing bloke by his sister. The sister’s husband, Youssef, seems to become her assistant. There’s a bit of unconscious racial profiling on her part. Looking forward to the next 8 episodes.
Just finished Bang Series 1 on SBS. In this thread, because it’s mainly in Welsh. What a sick bunch of units. Gina is a policewoman in or around Port Talbot, whose father was murdered 20+ years ago, and whose brother is a highly weak-willed character, possibly because he’s traumatised by being present at his father’s murder. Some ordinary units are involved.
Talking of which, the SBS On Demand app on LG TV is crap. Never resumes where I left off, sometimes going a whole episode forward or back.
6 episodes into The Fox. It’s set in Düsseldorf on the Rhine but has heavy memories of the GDR.
I felt a bit nostalgic so started to rewatch The Vineyard on Amazon Prime. Set in the 1850-1880 period in Jerez (on a sherry vineyard) in Andalusia, London, Mexico and Cuba. Gosh, the houses are dark, I suppose, being before electricity. Leonor Watling plays Sol, the young granddaughter of a prestigious sherry vineyard who’s married off to a wealthy English wine merchant. and Rafael Novoa plays Mauro Larrea, who’s ventured into mining in Mexico.
One was The Best of Us, a French series about a champion biathlete murdered shortly before a major tournament. A black woman police captain is set from Paris to the Alps.
The second one is The Paradise. Apparently a town on the Costa Del Sol is a retirement place for Finns too. A Finnish family has gone missing there, and a relative asks a detective to go down and look into it. The police detective is an older woman currently caring for her husband, who seems to be in terminal decline through Alzheimers or the like. The Finns and the Spaniards generally converse via English, the lingua franca.
And watched the second ep of Daughter from Another Mother (Netflix), similar to Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers where the babies are mistakenly swapped at the hospital. It’s OK…not great. Mexican series.
Also on Netflix is Unauthorised Living (Vivir Sin Permiso) about a Galician gang boss who’s just been diagnosed with Alzheimers and is keen to pass on the running of the empire to family. He has three children, two legitimate, Nina, who wants nothing to do with it and wants to run an art gallery, and a gay son, Carlos, who’s a coke addict and totally deceitful. There’s also an illegitimate daughter, Lara, who wants nothing to do with Nemo, her father, but he thinks is the best choice. 3 or 4 eps in, it’s not too bad, and Lara and Nina are both smoking.
Just get an Apple TV - faultless and always updated.
How would you rank the best foreign TV series / Mini-Series you’ve seen?
We’re watching the Pier at the moment because I remember you mentioning it. Up to about Episode 6 and finding it intriguing. But now I see there is a Season 2, which kind of disappoints me because I thought it was shaping to be a good one season only show. Hope they haven’t dragged it on into a second season just for ratings and ruined a tidy finish.
Recently, really liked Los Pacientes del doctor García, The Cook of Castamar, The Cathedral of the Sea, Valeria, Cable Girls all Spanish on Netflix
The Pier, I Know Who You Are, Tell Me Who I Am, Nasdrovia, La Fossa all Spanish on SBS
The Vineyard, Tiempo Entre Costuras, all Spanish on Amazon
Spiral, The Bureau, Paris Police all French on SBS
Plenty of Mexican ones on Netflix
Bad Banks, SBS German
Couple of Portuguese ones
Kleo, Babylon Berlin…German Netflix
One for @em2009 …on Netflix, by the author of Valeria, Elisabet Benavent…A Perfect Story (Un Cuento Perfecto)…a little bit of Runaway Bride, a bit of Greek scenery. I’ve watched the first episode.
There seems to be a Jose Coronado season on Netflix…Unauthorised Living, Snow Girl, A Perfect Family, Wrong Side of the Tracks.
I really enjoyed it, but dunno about the two optional endings. They were a pretty good couple.
I particularly enjoyed that weekend in Avíla when David’s friends realised who she was. The girl who twigged is a key player in Unauthorised Living as Nemo’s bastard daughter. Both his daughters are a solid 10.
Couple of new shows on Netflix…one a series, the other a doco.
Series is Burning Body (El Cuerpo En Llamas) and the doco is Rosa Peral’s Tapes, about an incinerated body of a Barcelona policeman (Mossos d’Esquadra is the police force there), where two of his colleagues (Rosa and Albert) are suspected of killing him.
Tokio from Money Heist, Úrsula Corberó, plays Rosa in the series and Quim Gutierrez Albert.
I’m interested to hear how they speak. It seems they speak Spanish in the main part and Catalan for more intimate things. Which surprises me, hearing how Catalunya brags about everyone speaking Catalan.
Started a couple of shows…first one I’m not too sure on yet…Las Viudas de Jueves - Thursday’s Widows…seems to be about a dodgy enclave of rich people in Mexico.
And the German show…Liebes Kind - Dear Child. Set in the westernmost city in Germany, Aachen, appears to have Fritzl vibes. If my history is right, Aachen was the major city of the Holy Roman Empire.
Edit…finished Liebes Kind tonight. Pretty weird unit, that dude.
Brilliant series. One of the best of this type of show IMO.
You might want to check out Kin and Crime, both also on SBS. While both are in English the Irish and Scottish accents make subtitles very useful at times. Crime, in particular, is quite grim so won’t be to everyone’s taste.
I’ve now finished Thursday’s Widows (pretty macabre Mexican series), Burning Body (pretty macabre murder dramatisation in Barcelona amongst 3 police officers) and Dear Child (very macabre German series).
Started the movie Nowhere on Monday. Europe is suffering from food shortages and measures are being taken. Pregnant women and children are being liquidated and Ireland is the only place not following the policy, so people are being packed into shipping containers. One container is left with Mia (Anna Castillo from A Perfect Story), who’s pregnant and alone after all the others in her container are discovered and shot.
Edit…finished Nowhere. Just a story of perseverance. Interesting in its own way, but depressing. Funny to see Anna Castillo, after having countless opportunities in A Perfect Story to do nude scenes, remains very shy, but happy to in Nowhere, although, being pregnant at first, then a new mother, we might have prostheses there. I couldn’t tell, and believe me, I tried, even cleaningmy glasses.
Started the SBS series Bonn, a Cold War series. German girl working in London about 1954, sick of being assumed to be pro-Nazi, returns to Bonn and joins the spy network.
Started Presunto Culpable (Presumed Guilty) on Stan last night. Set in the Basque Country of Spain where you get a bit confused with names because they’re pronounced in Basque fashion rather than Castilian Spanish, so Anne sounds like Arnay and Jon like Jon, rather than the Spanish Hon. The Castilian version of Anne is Ana, and Jon is Juan.
Jon is a biochemist who’s just returned to his home on his father’s suicide, after he left because everyone though he’d murdered his girlfriend Anne 6 or 10 years before, and he’s still extremely unpopular. First ep was good.
I also watched the first episode of Bonn on SBS. Not sure whether it’s setting up the West German intelligence service, or helping ex-Nazis leave the country, or wanting to go over to the Soviets, but Bonn’s a long way from East Germany.
And the first episode of a series of murder stories all over France. First one was Murder in the Auvergne Mountains. One is in Lourdes, which seems strange because all you’d have to do is dip the victim into the water and they’d recover.
Finished the second series of Hidden Assets, joint operation between Belgium and Ireland police, last night.
And finished Bonn just now. It did have a lot of true material, hunting Alois Brunner who was the Nazi boss in Occupied France, and involving the Gehlen Organisation, which became the BND, the West German intelligence service.
Only got 2 or 3 ofthe French murder stories in different parts of France. Last night’s was set in Lourdes. I expected the murdered man to be miraculously healed, but -spoiler - no.
This week I watched a Mexican series called Triptych. 8 episodes. It’s so ridiculous that I couldn’t stop watching. Basically there are female triplets deliberately separated at birth who happen to meet up in adult life. Each episode begins with a title saying that it’s based on a true story, and apparently there were three triplets deliberately separated at birth who met later in life; but they were male and there wasn’t a whole lot of stuff involving shootings, corporate dirty doings and corrupt coppers, all of which featured in the series.
Mrs Shelton couldn’t be bothered after episode 2. She may have shown better judgment than me.
Yep. Was utter shyte. Must admit that I like the female star, Maite Perroni.
I finished my SBS series Murder In: 12 different areas of France. Most of them were pretty good. There are probably 50 odd in total, but we’ve only got 12.
Also finished Piste Noire on SBS, based on a projected development in a ski resort in the French Alps. A gendarme has been sent back there from Lyon, to her home town which she left due to antagonism from her father because she preferred other ladies. One thing I couldn’t work out was why there were custody battles of her son with another couple…maybe the male half of that donated the sperm.