THERE are some hits, some misses and some mixed series coming audiences’ way this spring and for the rest of the year. This listing is a distillation of the 48 series from 19 countries screened recently at the largest TV festival in the world, Series Mania, in Lille, France.

As Europe swings toward a wartime footing and braces for the inevitable cutting of social services, there is also a distinctly ideological character to the choices and content of the series screened.

Out for a larger degree than previously was criticism of the internal workings of European societies. In was labelling of their erstwhile enemies, foremost among them being Russia. The “evil nation to the east” showed up even in pitches for future series including one about the aftermath of the 1980 sinking of the cruise ship Estonia. The pitch proposed the dastardly villain as an elderly Russian woman who kills her neighbours to recover diamonds stored inside a Russian doll.

Two Israeli series were much in evidence and both, in a sense, helped whitewash the ongoing tragedy in Gaza where the Israelis recently targeted and murdered the family of Fatima Hassouna. She was the photojournalist whose documentary had been accepted in Cannes the day before her murder, clearly carried out to keep her from walking the red carpet where she would have had a global spotlight to talk about the now final (?) stages of the genocide.

The German (Amazon Prime) in its crosscutting of a wife in the ’70s on a kibbutz and a husband tracking an ex-Nazi, took us back to the “golden age” of Israeli society where the kibbutz was seen as a collectivist experiment, rather than today where it is closer to a Silicon Valley start-up, and where tracking down the killers of World War II was regarded as a mission of justice by the Mossad, who have now simply become hardened killers.

The other series, Menace Imminente, or State Of Alert, deals with the terrorist hijacking of a device from Israeli intelligence that can lock down any computer, and is used in the opening scene to stall a car on a train track to assassinate a target as the train barrels through. It is suggested that the device has fallen into the wrong hands, rather than being safely ensconced with the Israeli army, where, of course a similar program was used to blow up pagers in Lebanon and more than 3,000 people were injured, many of them doctors, nurses and patients, since pagers were often used by medical workers.

All of which questions how safe the program is in the hands of Israeli intelligence.

There is a palpable air of menace that is sustained through both the increasingly tense story and the thumping music, that suggests that those in this society live each moment in a constant state of heightened tension. It is this heightened sense of danger that has allowed the Israelis to export suspense series, having participated in the creation of 24, and having adapted Homeland from an Israeli series.

What the series, perhaps unwittingly, reveals is the heartbeat of a society unceasingly at war.

Of the upcoming TV series the best are:

37 Seconds (ARTE) — Prized in the festival as the best French series, this ARTE or public television series winds the suspense ever tighter as the female friend of a relative of one of the six Breton fishermen drowned mysteriously in the English Channel importunes a lawyer to investigate the sinking, which occurred in the 37 seconds of the title, and the evidence starts to point to the presence in the area of either British or French military. The budding romance between the provincial schoolteacher bent on the truth and the Parisian lawyer who admires her steadfastness adds to the charm.

Log Out — Another French series, this time about a wife and mother whose husband dies in a mysterious explosion and who then must be a driver in a car service to make her living. She blocks out the tragedy until a man enters her lorry whom she recognises as the last person she saw before the house, with her husband inside it, blew up. She then flees with her son. The intrigue is palpable as she is pursued by whoever planned the explosion, but often the point of the series is how difficult it is, even if one’s life depends upon it, to escape the digital devices which track our every movement. That is, how it is impossible in today’s wired societies to literally, or metaphorically, log out.

Celeste (Prime video) — The improbable heroine of this Spanish series, played exquisitely by Almodovar actor Carmen Machi, is a retiring tax auditor with a yen for a younger accountant in her office, who is called back to work to round up some government revenue on the Mexican pop singer of the title who spends more time in Spain than she lets on. The contrast is between two lifestyles: one of unlimited extravagance, and the other of the tax investigator whose life is limited but who is fearless in her pursuit of securing the funds that help support Spain’s welfare state. Here’s hoping her next case is Elon Musk.

Long, Bright River (Channel 4) — Oscar-winner Amanda Seyfried stars in this series about a working-class Philadelphia cop who, on her beat of Kensington, because of her empathy for the street women that comes from one sister’s being a victim of the streets, is able to spot a serial killer which the rest of the force simply ignores. Yes, the series ressembles Mare of Easton, which the Guardian complained about, but somebody needs to tell their critic it is possible to have more than one series about a working-class woman. The patrolwoman’s pursuit of the “long river” of opioid victims inevitably leads back to the police themselves.

It is fascinating to see Seyfried, initially positioned in Hollywood as a seductive ingenue (Marion Davies in Mank), seize control of her career and instead fashion a complicated role that frees her of such patriarchal casting. My only qualm is that the series is heavily focused on Kensington’s Irish-American population when the neighbourhood is now a good deal more diverse than represented here.

Dennis Broe is a professor of film and television who has taught at the Sorbonne. He is also a novelist whose latest book about McCarthyism in ’50s Hollywood is The Dark Ages.