GREAT TV FROM JAPAN, AUSTRIA, PORTUGAL

Some Streaming Ideas for a Nasty Winter Weekend

With so much of the country suffering through miserable weather, and no football (the Pro Bowl does not count) this weekend, I thought I might suggest some streaming TV to watch. I've got broad tastes, but my favorite sub-genre is Quaint Location Crime Fiction (QLCF), a concept introduced in a meta-episode of the Newfoundland-based Republic of Doyle. I still recommend the six seasons of this antic father-son private investigator team, though current U.S. streaming rights are up in the air: some seasons are on Acorn TV, others may be elsewhere. Canadian subscribers either know about Doyle, or probably have access to CBC legacy programming unavailable in the U.S. Check your streaming device for more information.

Here are some more accessible shows that have given me great pleasure over the last few years that have not gotten the attention they have deserved. Be aware that I watch all TV aside from sports and news with closed captioning (CC). As a result, I have also come to favor programs in languages other than English.

Giri/Haji (Duty/Shame). Netflix. How much do I love this show, eight-episodes (each under an hour: 7 hours 41 minutes to binge, according to IMDB)? I watched it twice in 2021, which I don't think I've ever done with a streaming series. It takes place in Tokyo and London, in Japanese and English, so you'll need the subtitles. It's an addicting ensemble drama with a carousel of key characters and a complex array of situations, full of humor, romance, comedy, as well as a surpassing amount of violence. I'll try to keep it simple. Takehiro Hira is Kenzo Mori, a handsome, trustworthty Japanese police detective. He lives with his wife and daughter and mother- in-law in a Tokyo apartment. He is used to getting his brother Yuto (Yôsuke Kubozuka) out of difficult situations, but once Yuto has joined the Yakuza and killed someone he probably should not have, he flees to London. Kenzo's orders from the police brass: Mori is to go to London to bring his brother home. A few episodes in, Mori's teenage daughter Taki shows up at the airport in London, where she stays in the spartan room rented by her dad.

Complications and amusement set in when Kenzo (and later, Taki) meets Rodney (the bilingual, bicultural actor Will Sharpe), a young half-Japanese, half-British gay hustler and addict with a heart of gold, who becomes Kenzo's guide to the Japanese/London underworld. And there is Sarah Weitzmann (Kelly MacDonald), a Scottish Jewish London cop who has been ostracized by her colleagues for falsely testifying in a case that sends her ex, a fellow cop, to prison. Woman, Jew, rat: Boy, do her colleagues not like Sarah, though she does try to throw a Jewish New Year's dinner for her new Japanese friends. Rodney also introduces Taki to a lesbian friend of his, to weed, and gay clubs not quite appropriate for teenagers, but Taki seems to dig it all. There's also the issue with Yuto having become a bodyguard to a malevolent London gangster, and a territotial bloodbath with the Albanian mob in London. Sarah and Kenzo seem to fall in love.

Without spoilers, I'll say that the final episode, with all the players in London with guns pointed at each other on a rooftop (you can fill in the Let It Be/Get Back reference) turns into a gloriously choreographed ballet, and that an oldie played on the jukebox when Sarah and Kenzo discuss their possible future, brought me to tears, just because it was so gorgeous. And one more thing: the guns of the most vicious Yakuza gangsters are no match for an angry Japanese mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, armed with pots and pans.

Vienna Blood. Season two of this series about an investigative team in the early 20th century is in English on PBS, with new episodes each Sunday evening on the network, and access to the season through PBS Passport via Amazon Prime and preferred streaming devices. (We use Roku.) Although the first season played off the odd couple nature of the two protagonists, Vienna police investigator Oskar Rheinhardt (Austrian actor Juergen Maurer) and Freudian psychiatrist Max Liebermann (British actor Matthew Beard), season two finds them more closely bonded, their friendship, affinities, and complementary talents for criminal investigation bringing them closer and more comfortable to watch. Each has to navigate through the stressful class structure of pre-World War I Austria. Oskar's superior at the police department has a tendency to second guess, deflect, or try to bury his determination to thoroughly investigate socially sensitive cases. Max, the Freudian, is from a wealthy, socially connected Jewish family: he is under pressure from his parents to marry the right Jewish girl, his father to pursue a more acceptable field than scorned Freudianism, and he is forced to start a private practice because of both the anti-Semitism and distaste for Freud of his supervisor at the clinic where he practiced. Solving the crimes, which they do in every two episode arc, is secondary to the shrewd and convincing way Oskar and Max overcome the obstacles placed in their way.

The Journalist. (Netflix). The first Japanese series I've seen that features a female newspaper reporter, Matsuda (Ryoko Yonekura). She relentlessly pursues a cover-up of misappropriation of government funds intended for a school, a scandal that leads directly to the prime minister and his wife. What's most interesting is the presentation of the hierarchies of responsibility in a Japanese government that operates like a corrupt business. Each level of the government must protect the prime minister at all costs, including falsifying records, to the point of maintaining a vast, secret bureaucratic enterprise that rewrites history, known blandly as the Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office. It could have been called The Ministry of Truth, because it's the same business at which Winston Smith toiled rewriting earlier editions of the newspaper in George Orwell's 1984. This betrayal of truth and the law so troubles the bureaucrat given the hands-on responsibility to lead the cover up that he is often in tears, a Salaryman on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown. The focus on the workings of a print newspaper is of special interest to journalism buffs. And because there appears to be a need for a youth culture hook in Japanese television, even the youngsters who bike around the city before dawn, delivering the paper to mailboxes, have a role to play. But those who are not deeply engaged in journalism might find this slow and a bit sad. In Japanese, with subtitles.

Gloria (Netflix). Portugal, 1968, is in the middle of two wars. Its own doomed Vietnam, a colonial war in Africa against Angola and other former colonies, is one of them. The other is its place as a proxy between the United States and the Soviet Union in the Cold War. The centerpiece: an off-limits rural Portuguese broadcast center, whose enormous antennas are used to beam Russian language, pro-western propaganda to the Eastern bloc. Everyone who lives in this small town is involved in some way with the radio station. Most are aware that the pleasant American couple in town are CIA agents. Early in the series, a propaganda broadcast is replaced by a more innocuous tape in Russian, and the problem is obvious: There is a traitor, or traitors, in their midst. Some in town might not care about Portugal being a pawn in the Cold War, but have mixed feelings about so many of their sons dying and coming home crippled from the African wars: Some deem it heroic, others suicidal. As American paranoia about a Russian spy in their radio headquarters mounts, so do the ruthless deaths and disapparances of neighbors, employees, doctors, all suspected by either the Americans or the Portuguese secret police, the PIDE.

We know who one of the traitors is from the first episode on: João Vidal (Miguel Nunes) a war hero, ladies man, and heavy drinker who is the son of one of the highest ranking members of the Portuguese government

. The younger man is a Citizen Almost Above Suspicion, and the question throughout these taut episodes is: Will his drinking, sexual recklessness, and lapses of judgement expose him, or will his privilege save him at a time when Portugal was torn by conflicts about its own sovereignty and place in the world. Particularly good is actor Matt Rippy as James Wilson, the facetious CIA agent who is not only unscrupulous: He barely cares. Rippy is such a fine actor I did not notice that he played Captain Jack Harkness in the 2007 Doctor Who spinoff, Torchwood.

---