The world is watching: TV hits around the globe

A Spanish trans woman’s memoirs, a Mumbai gangster drama, Israeli sisters in trouble… the Covid era is a rich moment for TV drama. Critics from Spain to South Korea tell us about the biggest shows in their countries

France

Pierre Langlais, TV critic at Télérama: ‘Hypocrate is code red all the time – it’s very powerful’

I’ve been writing about French TV since 2005 and it feels like we’re always saying: “Ah, finally we’re making great work.” And then you get tons of shit coming out. That’s still true, but now there’s a new generation that at least wants to do things differently. And the best French shows, I believe, are brilliant. Hypocrate (Canal+) is one of them. Created by Thomas Lilti, who trained as a doctor, it’s about the everyday life of a hospital near Paris which is perennially in crisis. It highlights the lack of money and human resources in the French health system and it’s full of tension. In the first season, the senior doctors are quarantined at home so the younger doctors have to take care of the patients. In season two, the emergency ward gets flooded by water. So it’s code red the whole time. It’s very powerful, and sometimes tough to watch, but after The Bureau it’s considered the best French drama right now.

L’Opéra (OCS) is a fly-on-the-wall series about the Opera Garnier in Paris. You follow three main characters – the principal dancer, whose career is in jeopardy, the dance director and a young dancer who’s black in a historically white institution. Like The Bureau, it takes something that is very mysterious and romantic and shows what’s going on behind the scenes. You have a lot of people walking around the Opera dealing with contracts and lawsuits and there are strikes and unions as well as the classic rivalries on stage. I was very surprised how well it works. You really care about the characters.

Breakout TV star
Tiphaine Daviot, who was very believable in [romantic drama] Une Belle Histoire. She gives this feeling of being fragile, but with a very strong and complex inner world. Given the right roles, she could be one of the best actresses of her generation.

My TV moment of the pandemic so far
The show that really stood out for me was Ted Lasso (Apple TV). It’s exactly what we needed – smart and feelgood but not stupidly so.

South Korea

Nemo Kim, culture journalist and critic: ‘After Squid Game, people are looking for the next big hit’

There’s a tremendous sense of excitement among TV creators in South Korea at the moment. Before Squid Game, attracting international investment was like getting blood out of a stone. Now people are really receptive and looking for the next big hit.

DP is a compelling military drama that was number one on Netflix in South Korea a couple of months ago. DP stands for “Deserter Pursuit”: a South Korean military unit that chases down soldiers who go AWOL. Praised for its realistic portrayal of military life –the bullying, the substandard living conditions – it has a strong cast. Jung Hae-in plays the lead, an everyman who joins the unit and gets PTSD. It’s clever casting because, with his K-pop star looks, he has a huge female following in Korea.

Move to Heaven (Netflix) is about a young man with Asperger’s who inherits a cleaning service from his late father – specifically cleaning up after dead people, including suicides and murder victims. The show mixes his story with those of the dead people, told through photos and other possessions they leave behind. It’s really rare for Korean TV drama to focus on death and this show is also notable for centring on the lives and deaths of the “lowest of the low” in society. It sounds depressing, but I found it quite the opposite. It made me think that time is really limited and we need to focus on the precious things in life.

Breakout TV star
Lee Je Hoon, excellent in Taxi Driver, is incredibly versatile and crosses genres with ease.

My favourite TV moment of the pandemic
I really enjoyed Taxi Driver (SBS), an action thriller about a firm that specialises in helping ordinary people who have been wronged get revenge. It’s a realistic portrayal of how victims suffer in various dark corners of South Korean society.

India

Mini Anthikad Chibber, The Hindu: ‘The first season of Sacred Games burned everyone’s eyeballs’

TV in India used to be either soap operas or musicals. But just in the past year or two, some really good dramas have been released. Sacred Games is India’s first Netflix original series. It’s based on Vikram Chandra’s sprawling 2006 novel. When the book came out, I remember asking Chandra about the chances of it being adapted – it seemed impossible to condense the whole thing into a two-hour film. But now, with the rise of long-form TV, it totally makes sense. It’s about a policeman in Mumbai who gets a call from a gangster saying that he has 25 days to save the city. Then it goes back in time to tell how the gangster got into his life of crime and how he’s connected to the policeman’s father. It is a first for India in many ways: it has a bona fide movie star in Saif Ali Khan as the policeman (movie stars would never normally go from the big screen to the small); it’s dark and violent (the opening scene features a dog being thrown out of a building) and it delves into politics, crime and the police force. The cast is great, the writing is fantastic. It caught everybody’s imagination and the first season burned everyone’s eyeballs.

The Family Man is a fun thriller about a regular-seeming guy with a wife and two kids, who’s actually a spy working for an ultra-secret Indian intelligence agency. His family think he’s just some office drone, while actually he’s out there saving the world. Then he’ll get a call from the principal saying his daughter hasn’t turned in her school work. It’s light but also thrilling and great to binge-watch.

Breakout TV star
Jaideep Ahlawat, who plays Inspector Hathiram Chaudhary in the crime thriller Paatal Lok, is brilliant.

My TV moment of the pandemic
The White Lotus for its luxury setting as well as its satirical tone – a swanky resort in Hawaii at a time when one could not travel was very tempting.

Australia

Luke Buckmaster, Guardian Australia: ‘Wakefield has this air of unpredictability… the characters periodically break into song’

Wakefield (ABC) is a story about mental illness and the volatility of the mind. It’s told from the perspective of a nurse called Nik, played by Rudi Dharmalingam, who works at a facility in a beautiful part of New South Wales. There’s a mystery around whether the protagonist is losing his mind and the show teases out issues rooted in his past and his psyche. It sounds like quite a heavy, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest-style drama, but it’s told with real elegance and style, with really great performances. And it’s got this air of unpredictability. It takes you by surprise, when the characters periodically break into song.

The documentary The Beach, though it was made in 2019, seemed bizarrely well suited to the pandemic. It follows the respected Indigenous Australian film-maker Warwick Thornton (Samson and Delilah) as he spends time on his own at a beach shack in the middle of nowhere talking to the chickens, monologuing about times past and pivotal moments in his life. In a strange and lovely way, it’s also a cooking show as we watch him prepare fish that he caught himself and so on. It’s got a rustic, back-to-nature charm and looks really cinematic.

Stateless taps into Australia’s history of housing refugees and asylum seekers in detention centres in the middle of nowhere. The show oscillates between staff and detainees at the facility, as they riot or get caught up in their own personal dramas. It adds a rich, dramatic layer to a political discussion that has gone on in Australia for a long time around the ethics (or lack of ethics) involved in putting people who haven’t been found guilty of any crimes behind bars and stripping away their rights and basic dignities.

Breakout TV star
In ABC’s cunningly scripted comedy Why Are You Like This, Olivia Junkeer is excellent as Mia, who uses modern sensitivities to further her own agenda and distract from her rampantly immoral and unprofessional behaviour. It’s a sharp, prickly, attitude-filled performance.

My TV moment of the pandemic
The ending of The White Lotus, the most essential show of the pandemic. It is outrageously memorable, combining gross-out comedy with the resolution of a mystery teased out across its entire arc.

Germany

Andreas Borcholte, Der Spiegel: ‘Despite being about young people and drugs, it’s great fun’

Comedy is a mainstay in German television but it’s usually pretty dull. How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast) (Netflix), which has just launched its third season, is great, though – very fast and very funny. It’s about a young nerd who is starting an online shop for a school project. When his girlfriend comes back from a year in the US talking about MDMA, he gets the idea to sell drugs on the dark web. It’s good hearted, and despite being about young people and drugs, it’s not very dark. It’s great fun.

The Mopes (Ufa) is another clever comedy about a figure personifying depression, played by Nora Tschirner, who develops compassion for the struggling musician she’s assigned to. He’s not supposed to see her, but suddenly he becomes aware of her whispering things such as “You’re worthless” in his ear. Then they develop a friendship. It’s funny and sarcastic and the production design is great, which is pretty unusual for German comedy series.

Due to the international success of shows such as Dark, there’s a lot more money going around for German fantasy and sci-fi series. Tribes of Europa (Netflix) is pretty small-scale compared to similar American shows but it’s surprisingly good, with a younger audience in mind. After a climate apocalypse, Europe is divided into tribes, with Berlin as a centre of evil forces. When a family from a smaller tribe gets split up, three siblings have to find their way home through a Mad Max-like landscape.

Breakout TV star
Emilio Sakraya, who starred in 4 Blocks and was the lead in Tribes of Europa. He’s on his way to German film-stardom playing the notorious rapper Xatar in the forthcoming biopic Rheingold from director Fatih Akin.

My pandemic TV moment
Two very popular German TV entertainers, Joko Winterscheidt and Klaas Heufer-Umlauf (Joko und Klaas) won 15 minutes of airtime on the private broadcaster ProSieben to do whatever they wanted. They ended up with a six-hour documentary showing the work of nurses in an intensive care unit. It was fascinating, heartbreaking, shocking – and very brave.

Nigeria

Adesola Ade-Unuigbe, BellaNaija.com: ‘Think Peaky Blinders in Nigeria’

King of Boys: The Return of the King is a TV sequel to the 2018 movie King of Boys and the first original Netflix series from Nigeria. It tells the story of underworld kingpin Eniola Salami (Sola Sobowale) who wants to become governor of Lagos state, and her furious scramble to outwit her enemies. The acting, production and sheer expertise of the seven-part series were remarkable, and it was great to have so much of the dialogue in native languages. It was the right mix of gangsterism and drama. Think Peaky Blinders in Nigeria.

Castle & Castle (Netflix) is a drama series set in a Lagos law firm run by a couple, Remi and Tega Castle, who are struggling to keep their firm afloat. The cases offer a fascinating glimpse into the lives and cultures of Nigerians. Top-notch acting, developed characters and complex storylines make this a binge-worthy show.

I love how The Men’s Club (Red TV) has set the pace for web shows in Nigeria. The story follows the everyday lives of four male characters as they engage with women, business and the hassles of living in Lagos. Full of drama and humour, it is a super-relatable series which has gained a cult following.

Breakout TV star
Toni Tones, who stars as a younger Eniola Salami in King of Boys: Return of the King. She had to learn the Yoruba language for the role and spent a few months living with Sola Sobowale to pick up her mannerisms.

My TV moment of the pandemic
All that viral footage of kids and pets crashing live broadcasts from home – such as when Trivago CEO Axel Hefer’s grumpy son walks in on his CNN interview.

Israel

Hannah Brown, Jerusalem Post: ‘Nelly Tagar is probably the funniest actress I’ve ever seen’

So many Israeli series have been huge international hits in recent years – Fauda, Shtisel, Tehran, among many others – but there are a few great shows that haven’t been picked up or remade yet… Sisters is a comedy about three adult sisters whose lives fall apart when their parents go travelling. They are incapable of managing by themselves. The youngest is a miserable soldier whose boss underestimates her. The oldest, a schoolteacher, has become a lesbian and is trying to deal with her ex. The middle sister – played by Nelly Tagar, probably the funniest comic actress I’ve ever seen – can’t get a job and is completely hopeless. There have been three seasons so far but I feel like it could go on for ever, because the characters will never straighten out their lives.

I think Line in the Sand (Keshet 12) will be remade. It’s a fact-based crime drama starring Tsahi Halevi, set in Nahariya, a small coastal city in the far north of Israel, where criminal gangs became very prevalent and infiltrated the police force. It’s an action story, and gets a bit violent at times, but it’s very suspenseful.

Autonomies (Hot 3) is a dystopian series set in a future where Israeli society is divided into two separate territories, one secular and one religious. It’s an exaggerated version of the existing conflicts. It becomes a detective story when a girl is kidnapped from one side to the other. It’s quite noirish and has some really great actors. You can definitely recognise yourself on one side or other of the divide.

Breakout TV star
Shahar Tavoch was in Valley of Tears (Apple TV), a very strong series about the Yom Kippur war. He plays a young, nerdy guy who figures out that there’s going to be a huge battle but nobody will listen to him. It was very real, his performance. It really got to me.

My TV moment of the pandemic
The scene in The Queen’s Gambit where she’s in her bath when she’s meant to be playing a chess game and then comes down wearing this great black-and-white outfit. I just completely forgot about everything else that was going on in the world. That’s a sign of great storytelling.

Mexico

Mauricio González Lara, Letras Libres: ‘Un Extraño Enemigo is very noir, immersive and unsettling’

Mexico is one of the world’s most celebrated producers of soap operas, and they still dominate our TV, but there have been some notable exceptions in the past few years. Un Extraño Enemigo (An Unknown Enemy) (Amazon Prime) is a thriller about the political manoeuvrings behind the student protests in 1968 that ended in a mass killing perpetrated by government forces in Mexico City. It’s told in a very noir kind of way, the atmosphere is immersive and unsettling, and it features an amazingly calibrated performance by Daniel Giménez Cacho as the official who pulls the strings behind the curtain. It’s very dark but it has a lot of humour and you don’t need to know anything about Mexican history to really enjoy it.

Somos (Netflix), which means “We are”, is about a 2011 massacre of basically a whole town in northern Mexico by the Zetas drug cartel. It’s closer to The Wire than Scarface or Narcos, because it shows how the town struggles with the drug dealers in everyday life and you see how the different parts of the whole structure interact under the cartel threat. It was written by the novelist Fernanda Melchor, so it’s very dark and feverish and engrossing.

For something closer to a soap opera, there’s Luis Miguel (Netflix), a biopic of the amazingly charismatic pop singer, who is like the Mexican Frank Sinatra combined with Elvis. The show was a huge phenomenon in Mexico.

Breakout TV star
Harold Torres in ZeroZeroZero plays a guy from the army who breaks bad and becomes a narco. Paul Schrader wrote in his Facebook page that Torres reminded him of [the celebrated Japanese actor] Toshiro Mifune. It’s a great performance.

My TV moment of the pandemic
I caught myself postponing the viewing of all the masterpieces on my to-watch list for the endless consumption of food shows such as MasterChef, Top Chef, Hell’s Kitchen, The Great British Bake Off and [Spanish global gastronomy show] Me voy a comer el mundo.

Italy

Chiara Lagana, freelance culture writer: ‘Mattia Torres exposes Italian society with bittersweet irony’

La Linea Verticale (Rai 3) is about a man undergoing a medical operation to remove a tumour. It is autobiographical: director Mattia Torre was himself dealing with cancer (he died, aged 47, shortly after the series came out). Torre was a genius. He had a way of exposing our flaws and critiquing Italian society with wit and bittersweet irony. The show is really funny and devastatingly sad at the same time.

Niccolò Ammaniti is a very well-known Italian author who has branched out into directing. Anna (Sky Italia), adapted from his own book, is about a virus that kills only adults, so kids have to finda way to survive on their own. It’s set in Sicily, which no one ever thought could be the location for a dystopian drama.

Il Cacciatore (The Hunter) (Rai 2) is about a magistrate fighting the Sicilian mafia in the mid-90s. It’s not black and white – it doesn’t tell you that Mafia people are pure evil – and it’s really compelling. It reminded me a bit of Narcos, in the way it’s made, and it immerses you in Sicily like Gomorrah did for Naples.

Breakout TV star
Giulia Dragotto, who plays the title role in Anna, is just 14. Her career was launched by the show. Hopefully we’ll be seeing a lot more of her.

My TV moment of the pandemic
I got a lot of solace from rewatching all of Mad Men, one of my favourite shows.

Spain

Natalia Marcos, El País: ‘Antidisturbios is Spanish TV at its best’

2020 was a great year for Spanish TV drama. For me, the best was Antidisturbios [Riot Police] (Movistar+), created by Rodrigo Sorogoyen and Isabel Peña. It follows a riot police unit in Madrid, starting with an eviction that goes wrong before turning into a story about high-level corruption. The directing and the writing are brilliant, very realistic, with really gripping action scenes and outstanding performances. An example of Spanish TV at its best.

Also from 2020, Veneno (Atresmedia Player) was inspired by the real story of Cristina Ortiz, aka La Veneno, a trans woman who was very popular in Spain in the 1990s. The series, created by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, follows her story from prostitution to stardom to her death. It was revolutionary in Spain – a lot of trans people were involved on both sides of the cameras. A sweet, powerful, nostalgic and sad portrait of Spanish society in the 90s.

The recent boom of Spanish TV drama is rooted in the strength of free broadcast television, the place where the big hits are born. Antena 3 is the producer of Fariña (Cocaine Coast), a crime drama based on the story of the dealer Sito Miñanco and the drugs business that flourished on the Galician coast in the 1980s, when people in the fishing industry made quick and easy money from smuggling and drug trafficking.

Breakout TV star
Ana Rujas is a young actress and writer who co-created and starred in the drama Cardo (Atresplayer Premium), about a woman’s existential crisis following an accident. Her acting is so powerful and her voice as creator is so interesting that she’s definitely someone to watch.

My TV moment of the pandemic
I loved the pandemic comedy special of Mythic Quest on Apple TV+. It took advantage of lockdown limitations, with a smart use of the screens and videoconferencing. It reflected very well the loneliness, anxiety and uncertainty most people felt at the beginning of the pandemic. And it was hilarious.