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Television continues to pour into American screens from around the world, free of tariffs. Catching up with international series that have arrived this year (or are just about to arrive), we have a pair of Netflix adaptations of famous mystery writers, a soulful anime about overcoming grief, a Swedish marriage on the rocks and a love story in China\u2019s wild western mountains.<\/p>\n
Chris Chibnall is known for creating the dark crime drama \u201cBroadchurch\u201d and serving as showrunner on three seasons of \u201cDoctor Who.\u201d His loose adaptation of Agatha Christie\u2019s 1929 novel, \u201cThe Seven Dials Mystery,\u201d feels a little like a cross of those earlier shows. (Chibnall wrote \u201cSeven Dials\u201d and was an executive producer; Chris Sweeney directed it.) There is an emphasis on jokey humor, in the \u201cDoctor Who\u201d style of putting quotation marks around every withering retort and sly visual gag; and then there is a shift toward the dark and sentimental mood that often stole into \u201cBroadchurch.\u201d Neither approach has much to do with Christie. (To be fair, a bit of business involving a glove that reads like a reference to the O.J. Simpson case is actually taken straight from the novel.)<\/p>\n
There are compensations, though, some of which involve seeing Netflix\u2019s money right up on the screen. The re-creation of Chimneys, the setting of two Christie novels featuring the young sleuth Lady Eileen Brent (known as Bundle and played here by Mia McKenna-Bruce), is lovely. And Chibnall\u2019s manhandling of the plot meant that a crew and actors were sent to M\u00e1laga, Spain, so that two scenes could be shot in the ridiculously picturesque village of Ronda.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
McKenna-Bruce\u2019s performance as the dogged Bundle is a bit more dogged than you might like, but it\u2019s balanced by an assured, archly funny turn by Helena Bonham-Carter as Bundle\u2019s world-weary mother, Lady Caterham. Finally, all of the country house murders, the scampering about of bright young men, the sleuthing by Bundle and the denouement, now set on a train (more lovely countryside!), is dispatched in three episodes totaling a bite-size 161 minutes. (Streaming on <\/em>Netflix<\/em><\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Harry Hole (Tobias Santelmann), the protagonist of best-selling novels by the Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbo, is on the bottom rung of the bottomed-out-cop ladder. In the first season of this Netflix series, based on the novel \u201cThe Devil\u2019s Star\u201d and written by Nesbo, Hole (pronounced ho-leh) is grieving, on and off the wagon, suicidal and so toxic that his boss tells him to just stay home.<\/p>\n The show, a throwback to a heyday of more extreme Nordic noir, is in the same key \u2014 fastidiously gruesome, emotionally jagged, eerie for eerie\u2019s sake. (Choice detail: the copy of the Werner Herzog memoir \u201cEvery Man for Himself and God Against All\u201d lying next to a dead-drunk Hole.) The story, involving serial killing, a gang war, gun running, dirty cops, a secret society and lots of pentagrams, takes place during a heat wave in a trash-strewn Oslo; it\u2019s the summer of Sven.<\/p>\n \u201cDetective Hole\u201d exhibits the genre\u2019s preferences for sadism, sensationalism and crescendoing gore over plausibility. And Hole himself is kind of a drag, a situation that Santelmann (Ragnar the Younger in \u201cThe Last Kingdom\u201d) doesn\u2019t do much to alleviate. But the show is conspicuously polished and nice to look at \u2014 Ronald Plante did the cinematography \u2014 and it is graced with a number of distinguished Scandinavian actors, including Joel Kinnaman as Hole\u2019s nemesis and Anders Danielsen Lie in a small, creepy part as a very controlling husband. (Streaming on <\/em>Netflix<\/em><\/a> beginning Thursday.)<\/em><\/p>\n Most of the noise in the 2026 winter anime season has been made by big fantasy and science-fiction franchises like \u201cFrieren: Beyond Journey\u2019s End,\u201d \u201cJujutsu Kaisen\u201d and \u201cTrigun.\u201d This quiet, modest series offers a welcome contrast: a slice-of-life story about a writer who fiercely guards her time and privacy, but who unhesitatingly takes in her teenage niece \u2014 the daughter of the sister she hated \u2014 when the girl\u2019s parents die in an accident.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The not-so-great English title refers to the aunt\u2019s suggestion that the girl keep a journal of her observations. The more suggestive Japanese title, which can be translated as \u201cDiary From a Strange Land,\u201d gets at how the introverted writer, Makio, and the bereft, normally happy-go-lucky girl, Asa, both feel estranged from the insistent, alienating flow of the everyday world. <\/p>\n The show, whose 12th episode (of 13) premieres Sunday, treats their mutual struggles and misunderstandings seriously but lightly; Asa, who\u2019s nosy, judgmental and excitable (to an enervating degree) but thoroughly good-natured, is a marvelous creation. (Streaming on <\/em>Crunchyroll<\/em><\/a> and <\/em>Amazon Prime Video.<\/em><\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n Veronica Zacco was a writer for \u201cThe Bridge,\u201d the grisly crime drama about detectives in Copenhagen and Malmo, Sweden, who worked together across the Danish-Swedish border. \u201cScenes After a Marriage,\u201d her wistful mini-series about divorce from the Nordic streamer Viaplay, could not be more different from \u201cThe Bridge,\u201d but it refers back to that earlier series in one way: Each of its eight episodes is set at a Malmo restaurant where Kian (Ardalan Esmaili), who lives in Copenhagen, and Lovis (Eva Rose), who lives in Sweden, meet weekly to hand their two children back and forth.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The show\u2019s title invokes an earlier, heavier Swedish TV series about a fractured relationship, Ingmar Bergman\u2019s \u201cScenes From a Marriage,\u201d while its structure \u2014 it culminates in a rendezvous on Christmas Eve, when Kian has promised to sign divorce papers \u2014 may call to mind \u201cLove, Actually.\u201d And Zacco rides a bittersweet line between painful recrimination and comic-sentimental high jinks; she and the actors find notes of genuine feeling amid the power shifts, the hints of hookups and new lovers, the insouciance of the children and the claustrophobic environment of the slightly seedy pub. While Kian and Lovis keep fighting each other to a draw, the story\u2019s real hero turns out to be the pub\u2019s preternaturally patient bartender, Bobby, an aspiring singer and actor played by Danny Saucedo, a finalist on Sweden\u2019s \u201cIdol.\u201d (Streaming on <\/em>Amazon Prime Video<\/em><\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n This Chinese series is not top-drawer drama, but it is interesting in several ways. It stands out among Chinese productions by not being a glossy historical melodrama or a slick urban rom-com; set in the furthest reaches of the country, in the high pastures at the northern end of Xinjiang province, it has the look and feel of an independent film with an ethnographic focus. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s not as serious, or dour, as that sounds, however. It is a pastorale whose heroine, Wenxiu (Yiran Zhou), a young Han Chinese woman living and traveling with a community of nomadic Kazakhs, runs through the Altai Mountains like an Asian Heidi. The ethereal, deceptively gentle beauty of the landscapes and the sometimes uneasy, more often comic confrontations between tradition-bound locals and opportunistic newcomers should appeal to the same audience as that of a show like \u201cAll Creatures Great and Small.\u201d<\/p>\n That crowd-pleasing approach made the series a hit and an award winner when it was shown in China in 2024. (It won the Magnolia award for best series at the most recent Shanghai Television Festival.) It also underscores the show\u2019s utility as soft propaganda and tourism promotion. At a time when the Chinese government is putting more pressure than ever<\/a> on its ethnic minorities to assimilate into the majority Han culture, \u201cTo the Wonder\u201d sticks to its bucolic corner of Xinjiang and its quaint Kazakh sheep herders and horsemen, avoiding any reference to detention camps or persecution of the much larger Uyghur population. <\/p>\n It does not ignore the tensions between the Kazakhs and the Han characters, or the way the legal system chafes against the nomads\u2019 traditions. But its focus is on pluck and camaraderie and the cross-cultural romance between Wenxiu and a horseman, Batay (Yosh Yu), whose beauty rivals that of the Altai meadows. At this little yurt on the prairie, the future is being built along party lines. (Streaming on <\/em>Rakuten Viki.<\/em><\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\u2018Jo Nesbo\u2019s Detective Hole\u2019<\/h2>\n
\u2018Journal With Witch\u2019<\/h2>\n
\u2018Scenes After a Marriage\u2019<\/h2>\n
\u2018To the Wonder\u2019<\/h2>\n