My Pandemic Guide to International TV — Part Two

8 min readFeb 7, 2022

February 6, 2022, 9:52 pm
Filed under: pandemic, TV | Tags: A Very Secret Service, Always a Witch, Babylon Berlin, Brazilian TV, Call My Agent, Charité, Colombian TV, France, French TV, German TV, House of Flowers, international, Mexican TV, No One’s Looking, pandemic, Tamponné, The Bonfire of Destiny, The Five Juanas, The Girls from Impanema, TV

Last week, I took us (mostly) to Spain, Italy and Turkey.

And now it’s on to France, Germany, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and beyond.

France gave me some quality TV and Netflix gave them all silly titles in English. (I get the sense that the folks at Netflix thinks Americans are dumb and need dumb titles.) One of the few shows set in contemporary times that compelled me was Call My Agent which I really wish they’d called its French title, Ten Percent ( Dix Pour Cent). But no one asked me. So. One of the benefits of watching this show full of French stars was that when one of them appeared in the next French show I watched, I was very excited.

That show was The Bonfire of Destiny (French title: Le Bazar de la Charité — The Charity Bazaar — which is much more descriptive as this is an important setting/event of the show). It was harrowing at first, since it begins with a lot of people dying in a really terrible fire (at a Charity Bazaar!) but then becomes a really intriguing look at class and gender and culture in 1897. It felt like an adaptation of a classic novel from the old days that never actually existed, with some really complicated romances. There is, I have discovered a Turkish version of this show and now I’d very much like to see that, too.

Then, there was the cold war era comedy delight called A Very Secret Service (in French: Au Service de la France — In Service of France, once again, a much better title!) It’s got fewer women in it than I prefer but its bureaucratic idiocy made me laugh a lot. I sing to myself a line from it occasionally for no good reason except that I enjoyed it so thoroughly — “Tamponné. Double Tamponné.” (Stamped. Double Stamped.) In a giant global crisis, they are most flummoxed by which stamp to use for a form. It was a delight. A sexist delight but I didn’t care. And you know when I don’t care it must have been worth it.

On to Germany!

I started with Babylon Berlin last year. I’d avoided it for a while because I was afraid it was going to be too violent for me and it was too violent for me but my brother was living in Berlin at the time and he liked it so I watched it anyway and I wasn’t sorry, even if I did have to cover my eyes and ears more often than I’d like. I’d been curious about the Weimar era in Germany pretty much ever since Trump got elected so this show successfully brought me into those pre-Nazi times and helped me understand a few things. Also — a lot happens! Stylishly!

I also got hooked into Charité which is a series about a hospital in Berlin, based on historical people and events. The first season takes place in 1887 and deals with doctors’ attempts to cure and/or vaccinate against tuberculosis and diphtheria. It is a very interesting moment in time where some doctors are pushing for cleaning and sterilizing the hospital and the nurses and other doctors are skeptical. It is a fight that has a clear winner but in these times, is interesting to watch play out. Their second season takes place during World War Two and I have to say, watching a World War II show from a German hospital staff’s perspectives was hard but illuminating. Watching well meaning doctors look away from eugenics happening right in front of them or claiming that the harrowing tales of their government that made it to their ears was all propaganda. I guess I understand now how folks like that fooled themselves. I’m seeing people do that now.

But I haven’t just watched shows from Europe.

I’ve told you about Mexico’s already and I’m in the middle of The Five Juanas, which is very silly, soapy and kind of trashy. It’s about five women (named Juana! Surprise!) who discover they all have the same birthmark and therefore the same father. Ridiculous though it may be, it is super interesting to realize that I can sometimes distinguish between accents in Spanish now, after having watched so much TV from several places. I can hear that the Juana from Colombia sounds very different than the one who grew up in Spain, who sounds different from the three from Mexico.

There was a lot of pleasure in Colombia’s Always a Witch, even though its premise was off the charts problematic. (A slave woman in love with the master’s son is set to be burned at the stake for witchcraft but is saved by going to the future where she spends all her time trying to get back to her boyfriend. {Yes, the boyfriend whose family owned her.} Oh, Honey, no.) But the music was great and the witchery was fun and they realized their mistake by the second season but it may have been too late. I’m pretty sure it’s been cancelled. It is fascinating to watch a show screw itself up so badly.

On to Brazil!

One of the most unique shows I’ve seen on this kick I’ve been on was No One’s Looking which is about these bureaucratic angels who start to break the rules. It is an odd odd world and I admired the quirky design a lot. My favorite part may have been when the angel middle manager takes his team to go see some “stand up comedy” and it turns out to be a very sincere motivational speaker talking about angels. The angels watch from the balcony laughing their wings off. If you’ve ever wanted to watch office worker angels dance, take drugs and generally explore being human, this show is for you.

The other Brazilian show was called The Girls from Impanema (in English — in Portuguese it’s Coisa Mas Linda, which is a line from the song “Girl from Impanema”). This show falls in line with my usual interests by being the story of women at work, trying to make things work. The story is of a woman whose husband leaves her and so she starts a club and becomes the center of the Bossa Nova scene in Rio. I almost quit watching the show at the top of season two when they brought back her husband and he took over her club. And I guess this is a spoiler but I know I would have appreciated knowing that she and her girls would turn it around and send him packing again within a couple of episodes. The women in the show are all pretty amazing and do remarkable things. The biggest flaw is that the writers seem to subscribe to the “All Men Are Trash” school where even the good ones do some very bad things. I found all that pretty tiresome but the music and the cool dames kept me going. You’ll want to get out your bossa nova albums after this show.

Other shows I tried:

The Egyptian version of Gran Hotel (Hmmm. Nope. Didn’t do it for me.)

I tried to watch Cathedral by the Sea (Spanish) but if you start your show with repeated sexual assaults, I’m out.

I didn’t get more than 15 minutes into Bolivar (Colombian) or The Last Bastion (Peruvian).

The first episode of Paquita Salas (Spanish) had a quality. But I feel like I’ve seen that quality elsewhere and better in other shows.

There are a lot of cultural holes in my watching that I would like to fill in. I feel like I’m really missing a lot of good things from Asia and Africa. I tried Giri/Haji — which was just too macho for me and I’m interested in Kingdom but just can’t ever seem to face it. Anyone who can point me toward the Korean feminist period drama section of the video store will get a big thank you.

I realize, too, that I am constrained by the limitations of the streaming services. They only show me what THEY want to show me. I’m subject to Netflix’s tastes as much as my own. I may have to investigate alternative international streaming services. After all, Netflix has cancelled a lot of my favorite shows — and removed some great ones from the platform. ( Gran Hotel, The Time in Between and I never got to see it but I heard The Ministry of Time was amazing.) I did just read that Netflix has started to open up to the African film and TV world so I’m looking forward to seeing what emerges there.

If you have international favs, please tell me about them, especially if they’re period dramas about women working. I may have exhausted Netflix’s Spanish TV resources and Amazon’s Pantaya service tends to not have English subtitles so I gotta branch out! Or get better at Spanish! At some point, I suppose I’ll want to watch more than a couple of shows in English again but for the moment, I’m just much more interested in the worlds far away from here.