“If Scandal is the stroppy younger sister who goes screeching down the street at 3am with her high heels in the air, Borgen is the straitlaced older sibling who went to college and got a proper job.”
It’s time for your next binge watch. You’re doing your best wine mom, with your feet up and some food on. But what to watch?
Consider: foreign-language TV. I know, I know, subtitles are scary, but it will be worth your while. Once the domain of insufferable hipsters and long-suffering language students, it’s now an ever-expanding currency of exchange in a multicultural world. So why should you make time for it?
Foreign language entertainment forces you to pay attention. You can’t have one eye on your ex’s Instagram when you actually have to focus on the episode in front of you. Relying on snippets of dialogue or fleeting glances just doesn’t work when there’s another language or subtitles involved. Perhaps related to the fact that you’re actually immersing yourself from start to finish: some of this stuff is actually gripping. It gives your brain something to get stuck into; you suddenly notice expression, gesture, landscape, pacing. You see how other cultures deal with ideas of politics, sex, gender, faith, love. How do they ask questions of themselves? Is this show playing catch-up to some English language equivalent, or is it miles ahead? Most importantly, it’s a chance to enjoy something fresh and new, whether it’s a soapy romance or a tense thriller. Maybe the show you’ve always dreamed of is out there – you just have to look a little further afield to find it.
After all, some international sensations have already made their way into our regular viewing. Twenty-first century television has been fascinated by Scandinavian noir, a particularly bleak style of crime drama. Swedish-Danish co-production The Bridge was (and is) still being shown on the BBC when it was subjected to a kind of parallel adaptation in the form of Anglo-French remake The Tunnel. Kenneth Branagh hasn’t acted on the small screen since Wallander, a near-iconic drama about a Swedish detective who lives in a permanent state of greyscale existential crisis and sounds suspiciously like he went to RADA.
“Parisian police drama Spiral has had a louche, on-again off-again relationship with existing since about 2005.”
One of the first new foreign-language productions of the 2010s to really cause a stir in English-speaking countries was Borgen, a Danish political drama which imagined the rise of a fictional female prime minister, Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen, lately seen in HBO’s Westworld). If Scandal is the stroppy younger sister who goes screeching down the street at 3am with her high heels in the air, Borgen is the straitlaced older sibling who went to college and got a proper job. All no-nonsense suit jackets and smooth camerawork, it was intelligent, strangely prescient (Denmark elected its first female prime minister for real two years into the series’ run) and even a bit sexy. It was graded with a peculiar kind of loneliness, as characters grappled with political fractures, tense relationships, and immense ambition – this was, after all, an image of Denmark before the international rebrand of hygge (a cultural concept centred around moments of cosiness and charm). As a bonus, pre-Game of Thrones Pilou Asbaek stars as media advisor Kasper, who has a troubling ability to turn describing the mechanics of a John F. Kennedy speech into chat-up lines.
In case you thought Scandinavian television was only for blazer-bedecked professional women and those couples who work through entire series in tandem (“the couple that boxsets together stays together”?), the youth have been getting in on the act, too. Skam, – a Norwegian web series about ethereally beautiful, upper middle-class Oslo high schoolers and their aspirationally angsty inner lives – spread with the air of a giddy secret, albeit one half the teenagers in Europe were in on. It must have felt at once grown-up and deliciously adult-free. It combined the up-close-and-personal style of scripted reality with a cool-toned colour palette and high-drama storylines, with each series focused on one character, including lipstick-loaded Noora (Josefine Frida Pettersen) and brassy hijab-wearing Sana (Iman Meskini).
If you’re more of a historical drama fan, a recent trend in Spanish television has you covered. Set in sixteenth century royal courts, shows like Isabel and Carlos, rey emperador (“Charles, King Emperor”) are reminiscent of the soapy, heyday of The Tudors. Fans of Downton Abbey and Endeavour will recognise the stylings of Gran Hotel (“Grand Hotel”), a mystery-heavy upstairs-downstairs drama set in 1906. Present-day thriller Money Heist (a frankly nonsensical retitling of the much more evocative La casa del papel, “The house of paper”) is Netflix’s most-watched non-English language series; however, snapping at its heels is period drama Cable Girls. Set in a dark and stylish 1920s Madrid, it follows four working women as they keep secrets and get caught up in a surprising number of crimes. If you can, watch it in Spanish with subtitles; the American dub is extremely disconcerting. Narcos and Sense8 alum Miguel Ángel Silvestre is the heir to a prestigious fashion house caught up in a cross-class love story in 1950s-set telenovela Velvet; a 1960s-set spin-off, Velvet Colección (“Velvet Collection”) is about to enter its second season. The cross-century historical-fantasy epic El Ministerio del Tiempo (“The Ministry of Time”), sees a sixteenth-century soldier join forces with a nineteenth-century student and a twenty-first century paramedic as part of a secret organisation who guard the doors of time.
This leaning towards period drama is still going strong, with shows like La Peste (“The Plague”), a crime drama set in Inquisition-infested 1590s Seville, and La otra mirada (“The Other Look”), set in a 1920s school for young women, added to the slate in 2018. It’s not just Spain, either. Also in 2018, Brazil added historical-fantasy telenovelas including ratings success O Tempo não Para (“Time Doesn’t Stop”), about an 1886 shipwreck whose victims, trapped in ice, are brought back to life in the modern day, and Deus Salve O Rei (“God Save the King”), a pseudo-medieval melodrama about a king who gives up his throne for a commoner and the chaos it causes.
Historical drama Charité may have a French title, but it’s actually a German production, named after the famous Berlin hospital. Set in 1888 amidst a bustle of Nobel Prize-winning medical breakthroughs and industrialisation, it centres on new nurse Ida (Alicia von Rittberg). It was created by Ghanaian-British writer Michaela Coel, best known for her work on offbeat BAFTA-winning comedy Chewing Gum. For Coel, this was a versatile genre-swerve not unlike that of cult dark comedy Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s move to edgy spy drama Killing Eve.
For actual French dramas, there’s political thriller Spin (the English title for Les Hommes de l’ombre, “The Shadow Men”), set in the wake of a French president’s assassination. Mr Selfridge and Beowulf actor Grégory Fitoussi stars as Ludovic, a spin doctor with a penchant for fast cars and liaisons, locked in rivalry with his former mentor. Whereas Danish, the spaghetti hoops of languages, has to be overcome in Borgen, in French everything they say sounds either deadly serious or like ordering hotel breakfast. Spiral, a Parisian police drama which has had a louche, on-again off-again relationship with existing since 2005 and airs on BBC Four, went into production of a seventh series earlier this year. This drama isn’t afraid of its blunt female lead or killing off fan-favourite good guys; it’s a gritty shock to the system in the patterned world of the police procedural.
Looking for something a little lighter? Look no further than the recent explosion in popularity of South Korean K-dramas. You can’t flick through any TV guide in Western media these days without landing on something dark and critically acclaimed – Stranger Things, The Handmaid’s Tale, Game of Thrones, Black Mirror. K-dramas, in contrast, offer solace in the feel-good factor. While distinctive in style and culture, many forefront a romance or a predictable set-up; both 2009’s Boys Over Flowers and 2016’s W Two Worlds, for example, feature a heroine with a quirky personality who is poor or working-class who meets a handsome, rich and ludicrously cocky love interest. These formulae aren’t just pulled from anywhere; due to the nature of K-drama shooting and writing schedules, many have a strong element of fan participation, with plots written to fulfil audiences’ wishes. The range of K-dramas available is increasing, too; some recent additions to Netflix include Strong Girl Bong-soon, about the romantic and familial tribulations of a young woman born with superhuman strength, and Something in the Rain, one of the highest rated K-dramas of the year so far.
It is notoriously difficult to carry straight-up comedy across cultures. Humour can be so tied up in specific cultural experiences and national identity that its effects are dampened in translation. Drama just seems easier to market. India’s fabulously-costumed Razia Sultan – a medieval historical drama about the first female ruler of the Delhi Sultanate – has been running since 2015 and earned an intro from Bollywood icon Shah Rukh Khan, but comedian Aditi Mittal’s effortlessly bilingual Netflix special Things They Wouldn’t Let Me Say remains a hidden gem. Circling back to Denmark, filthy feminist comedy-drama Rita – think Bad Teacher meets Catastrophe – aired its fourth season in 2017. For something a little gentler, try Nativity!-style spin-off Hjordis.
So before you go back to watching reruns of Grey’s Anatomy or longing for the next series of Queer Eye, fill your time with some of these international alternatives. Whether you want to bring back the guilty pleasure or impress your friends with your newfound sense of culture, embrace the subtitles: there’s a whole world of sensational storytelling out there.
This article previously featured in our print edition, available now across campus and locations around Dublin.
