I intermittently support public TV, so am giving monthly donations largely so I could see the American Revolution series from Ken Burns - which is okay, but lacks the ample fascinating archive footage displayed in many of his other series.
The support gets me access to several well known quality TV shows, many British, most of which I haven’t seen as I don’t watch much TV.
But it also gets access to a serious of “foreign” TV shows in original languages with English subtitles “curated by Walter Iuzzolino”. These are mainly crime thingies, most with IMDb ratings around 7, with 3k reviews.
Are any of these shows better than advertised? (Or are they a nothing burger?). Here is a list of shows offered. Never really heard of any of these Danish, Italian, etc. shows?
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls569998701/?sort=popularity%2Casc
What do you mean by “better than advertised”?
Walter runs in the UK on the Channel 4 player. They picked up on the success of the Danish original “The Killing” on BBC, and realised there was a market for foreign language drama: crime-based stories are a familiar format for an audience to fit into, though there are others.
Some work through other familiar tropes (you might guess which Danish programmes went for the same sort of audiences as, say, Downton Abbey or Call The Midwife), a lot are police procedurals, some have the quirky/misfit non-professional detective, some have more emotional depth, some captured loyal audiences in the UK - whether it’s just the unfamiliar settings or the different ways police and judicial processes work, I don’t know.
Some of the most successful in the UK might not be on Walter Presents, but if you can find them, I 'd recommend the French series Engrenages (“Spiral”) or the Italian Inspector Montalbano, and the Danish political drama Borgen. You might try the French Astrid, or Professor T (Belgian original or British remake)
The Channel Four Walter Presents was also home to ‘Servant of the People’. Whatever happened to the comedian who played the Ukrainian President in that?
I really enjoyed watching Servant of the People (on Canada’s Vision TV). If anything shows truth is stranger than fiction, that has to be one of the highest order exhibits.
“Better than advertised” implies that a 6/10 rating on IMDb is (while far from definitive) somewhat unimpressive. Though I have heard people speak well of Borgen.