, a spectacular espionage show out of France, subtitles are a difficult hurdle for many American viewers to cross, at least in the presence of a sophisticated show; if we’re going to tolerate them, we want the drama to be simple and sugary, a lahad been produced in, say, New Orleans, I’m convinced it would be considered an all-time crime classic, perhaps just a half-notch belowSo consider this essay praise for the entire five-season run of the show, and a call to invest the time to start from...
This intelligence is not surprising, considering the show’s creator Roberto Saviano, who wrote exposes on Italian crime families and has had to live with security protection for almost two decades. Like, the creative mind behind the drama is a journalist, and he brings with him a bird’s-eye view to the world he’s recreating. The danger here is for the story to run dry, but that never happens; this is anthropology, sure, but without losing the intensity of the individual human experience.
main character you can’t kill, it becomes hard to raise the stakes in a meaningful way. The solution the writers often attempt is to construct wilder and wilder scenarios to artificially heighten tension, and it cheapens the realism while falling short of the desired effect since the underlying impossibility of a character’s death remains. That phenomenon appeared in the third season, was eliminated by the fourth season, but is probably at its worst in the fifth.