BLAND is the word this year for so much of what is on offer at Series Mania, a festival held in Lille, France, although there are also really horrible series, and a few exceptional ones.

The Good

The best new series of the festival by far was the Swedish My Brother (SVT Play), about the return to a small rural northern town of a woman trying to save her alcoholic brother, and trying herself to make peace with a troubled family past. A model for how to use flashbacks, not in the American CSI mode of simply smothering the audience with plot, but of illuminating and deepening character in a trenchant critique of the Western family structure.

The Australian series Dustfall (BBC iplayer), filmed in what is becoming one of the capitals of global series production, the rugged countryside of Queensland, has the superb Anna Torv (The Last of Us, Fringe) as a caring cop investigating what appears to be a series of rapes in an uncaring and primitive masculine environment which, in its unrelenting exploration of this milieu, recalls Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake.

HBO France checked in with Privileges, where a black female inmate in a prison release programme is indoctrinated into the ways and wiles of rich Parisian hotel clients whose whims must be catered to. This is the modern A Propos De Nice which lays bare the inequality that structures modern life and stands in contrast to a blander approach on the same topic in TFI and Netflix’s Summer of ’36.

Finally, there was the first half of the conclusion of the Peaky Blinders saga, The Immortal Man (Netflix), where Tommy Shelby returns from a guilt-plagued retirement to combat a Nazi master plan to end the war. The first half has something major at stake but the second half, where even creator Steven Knight seemed to be bored, dissolves in a haze of personal anguish which even the strongest series afficionados are finding hard to swallow.

The Bad

The worst series in the festival, which will probably be a hit in the US, is the Succession-inspired The Audacity (Prime Video), a truly repulsive application of the Succession formula of following disgusting characters, there in the media industry, here applied to Silicon Valley. The leads, including an entrepreneur trying to keep his start-up afloat, are all neurotic power-hungry pampered denizens, including a psychotherapist, who populate this world separate from the rest of humankind.

The problem though is we are asked to loathe their personal foibles rather than to understand how these personal insecurities lead to a global grab for power and control. This is not Silicon Valley where Mike Judge satirised and laid bare this structure. Here loathing is simply a new way of attempting to maintain our fascination with a class that everyday tightens its grip on our lives.

Worse yet, though no less innocuous is Das Manko (ZDF), a German series that purports to be a satire of work in a modern office in a series of vaudeville vignettes which may have worked on the German stage but fall exceedingly flat on screen. This is no The Office or Mike Judge’s Office Space, satires of actual office power politics. Rather, here the series most often punches down, making the workers the butt of the joke.

The slapstick has been compared to Jacques Tati’s satires of France’s consumerist culture of the 1950s. The comparisons are apt, but unfortunately this series, which purports to capture modern office life, instead simply looks ancient. That is, it recalls office life in the 1950s, 75 years behind modern techniques of office manipulation.

The Bland

Blandest of the bland was The Testaments (Disney+) which squanders the subversive cultural cache of Chase Infinity from One Battle After Another in this sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. The heavy-handedness and mirthless self-righteousness of the story (in contrast to, say, the actual resistance depicted in The Hunger Games) slows this series — which focuses not on the working-class female victims of the theocracy but on their privileged daughters — down to a crawl.

The supposedly tense Spanish political series, billed as the epitome of European democracy and resistance to fascism, Anatomy of a Moment (Movistar Plus+), in fact focuses on a political manipulator who makes sure that Spanish democracy, in combatting an attempt by Francoist forces to reinstall the dictatorship, is fashioned cautiously from above. It makes for low not high drama, but in its depiction of a democracy fashioned from on top is perhaps an accurate view of that form in Europe today.

Finally, The Best Immigrant (Streamz) is a Belgian series which purports to be a satire of a totalitarian Flemish state which banishes all those not native born. It takes place some time in the future, or in the present, in Trump’s America. The problem is through the disingenuous device of staging a reality TV show where the winner gets to stay in the country, the series partakes of the same kind of exploitation it purports to lambast.