The Good: 

Machine (ARTE/Amazon Prime)

This series, written by Thomas Bidegain (A Prophet), currently available to be streamed for free on the Arte website, crosses the always vibrant French social realist tradition with kung fu sequences.

A young woman, escaped most likely from the French military, hiding out in a small town and counselled by a Marxist worker of colour, combats factory goons intent on breaking a strike in support of keeping the factory in France instead of the buyer’s intention of moving it to Poland to save money.

The male-female camaraderie and the concealed power of the female combatant echoes the Gina Davis/Samuel L Jackson film The Long Kiss Goodnight and makes for a compelling ride. 

Dates In Real Life (Prime)

This Norwegian series touchingly and with a good deal of humour confronts the problem of a generation raised in a virtual reality and not as the titled phrase suggests “In Real Life.”

A 25-year-old, Ida, with an online relationship in the US must enter the dating world when he “cheats” on her by having a physical relationship in his town.

The dating world she enters though shows the strains of the online “reality” as she encounters one date whose sex life seems to have been torn from his own online porn activity and another who, possibly also for the same reason, climaxes “in eight seconds.”

Very wise satirical rendering of our current shattered reality, pointing up also that English is the digital language shared by the online couple, with its prominence indicating the global dominance of US tech. 

Disko 76 (Prime)

The most exuberant and liberatory of all the new series. Fleeing a bland marriage and an overbearing father whose oppressive rigidity recalls the Nazi era, the young German woman, Doro, and her more reluctant brother discover the glamour and freedom of the dance floor through the intervention of black US GIs and then open their own disco in the small town of Bochum.

The music hums and the dancing, especially of a dance team, the male member of which Doro falls for, is a sensational revival of how, much like rap later, the disco era liberated not only the dance floor but the zeitgeist around it. 

Blackout (Prime)

Korean series about a teen drunkard whose last high-school binge may have resulted in the death of two girls.

He cannot remember what happened because he drank so much but his traces are all over a bloody scene that might have been the murder location.

He is sent to prison, released 10 years later, and now must confront his past and figure out who may have actually committed the crime in a town that hates him.

A well-worn trope (Savage River, Back to Life, Rectify) but one that always, as here, produces an invigorating series that challenges the justice system. 

The Bad: 

Maxima (Prime)

Billed as “The Crown but in the Netherlands,” this series about an Australian investment banker working in New York who slowly falls for a Dutch prince is not a rags-to-riches but rather a rich-to-richer tale.

It asks the poignant question: “Can a girl from the 10 per cent ever really be happy with a boy from the 1 per cent?”

Opening teaser, supposedly the most dramatic moment of the series, has the banker screaming at her royal mate: “You’re telling me my father can’t come to the wedding?” It’s all downhill from there. 

Hotel Cocaine (Prime)

This mirthless series by Narcos creator Chris Brancato, centred around a Miami hotel at the height of both the disco and cocaine frenzy, unlike Disko 76, misses the exuberance of the moment in the decision to save money by not buying the rights to disco hits and by its ill-conceived idea that watching gangsters put stuff up their nose is sexy and engaging.

Traces the conflict of two Cuban brothers, the manager of the hotel and a drug lord, in a well-worn trope executed grimly and unimaginatively.  

The Interesting: 

Il Camorrista/The Professor (Prime)

The first, directed by Cinema Paradiso’s Giuseppe Tornatore, stars Ben Gazzara as a Southern Italian mobster.

The 1986 series, which was also shot as Tornatore’s first film, was never released because the mobster it was clearly based on threatened the director and producers both legally and physically.

With he and his wife now deceased, the series is finally getting a release. High point of a series that features a flawless Gazzara is his appearance in episode four before the magistrate where he is charged with over 300 killings.

He waves his hands and professes (the original English title of the film was The Professor) to have no idea why he is there since he only ever wanted to help people.

The Belgian documentary The Vatican, a kind of lukewarm treatment of the corruption and sexual crimes of that institution, has a remarkably similar scene of a cardinal, himself perhaps implicated in embezzling funds, claiming that likewise he also “only wants to help people.” 

The Banker and The Bomb (Prime)

Almost documentary portrayal of the Deutsche Bank high official who created a sensation in the financial world by in 1987, at the height of the global and particularly Latin American debt crisis, proclaiming that banks should be in the business of forgiving debt to allow Third World countries to grow.

Herrhausen then “pioneers” female integration into the banking hierarchy and embraces computers as part of the beginning dominance of financialisation.

He is monitored by the CIA for his stand on debt but also eventually the victim of, as the series has it, a combination of the East German Stasi and the Red Army who are sheltered and aided in the Arab cities of Baghdad and Damascus.

Yeah to the exposure of the “dangers” of Herrhausen’s wanting to cancel debt. Nay to the way the series represents his latter “improvements” as neutral and the paranoid way it brings together disparate elements which oppose him.