This quirky three-episode police procedural on Masterpiece Theater follows a sullen, street-smart Dutch detective, Piet Van der Valk (Marc Warner), who navigates the seedier side of lively Amsterdam. Each two-hour episode of Van der Valk involves a distinct crime that can be watched on its own.
Solving convoluted crimes using astute human observation and inspired detection, Van der Valk is successful, in part, due to the support of Inspector Lucienne Hassell (Maimie McCoy) and rookie Officer Job Cloovers...
“The Goldfinch”–Art and Loss
Goldfinch (2020), based upon Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, tells the story of a young boy, Theo ( the astonishing Oakes Fegley), who is walking through galleries with his beloved mother at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They gaze at a Dutch Master painting of a chained bird, the Goldfinch, when a terrorist bomb goes off. Theo’s mother dies and he escapes the rubble, clutching the 17th-century masterpiece and a dying man’s insistence that he take his ring. The little boy’s life...
“Belgravia”– Downton Abbey REDUX
Belgravia, based on “Downton Abbey” creator Julian Fellowes’ 2016 novel of the same name, opens two days before the Battle of Waterloo at an aristocratic ball. Two London families—the Earl (Tom Wilkinson) and Countess of Brockenhurst (Harriet Walter) and the up-and-coming merchants, Anne (Tamsin Greig) and Philip Trenchard (Philip Glenister), are uncomfortable in their brief interactions. There are insurmountable class differences and if that were not enough, the romance between the Brockenhursts’ son and...
“High Seas”–“Death on the Nile” meets “Murder on the Orient Express”
In this Spanish melodrama (Spanish: Alta Mar) , two sisters discover some very disturbing family secrets aboard a ship sailing from Spain to Brazil just after World War II. Agatha Christie’s style of mystery plotting, overlaid with the Spanish love of melodrama and telenovela, makes High Seas an unusual series.
Following the death of their father, sisters Eva and Carolina Villanueva travel on the luxury ocean liner, Bárbara de Braganza. The sisters, over the course of three seasons, become committed to investigating mysterious...
“Humans”–“Dark Mirror” Meets “Ex Machina”
The Amazon Prime sci-fi series, Humans (three seasons), takes place in the not- too-distant future where the affluent purchase “synths”, artificially intelligent human-looking robots that can perform a multitude of tasks from housecleaning, surveillance, and sex-toy services. A suburban family buys Anita (the exquisitely beautiful Gemma Chan of “Crazy Rich Asians”) to help with the burdens of a professional couple. The father, Joe (Tom Goodman-Hill), is a manager in a factory who is replaced by synths. His wife, Laura (Katherine Parkinson of Pirate Radio and Doc...
“The Alienist: Angel of Darkness” (Season Two)–Stranger Things Happen
In this relatively seamless sequel to “The Alienist”, based on Caleb Carr’s second psychological thriller, season two is a retelling of Carr’s Angel of Darkness. But this is much more than a sequel. (For my review of season one, see my April 29, 2018 review: “The Alienist”–Something Wicked This Way Comes).
The year is 1897, a scant three years before the dawn of the 20th century, in the Gilded Age. In New York City, a serial killer is kidnapping and murdering babies. Angel of Darkness opens with a grisly...