Comedy, high drama and spy capers: the foreign telly we discovered in lockdown

Lupin: a French hit that went supernova on Netflix

As we emerge blinking into the post-Covid daylight, it is clear the world has been turned upside down. Britney Spears is our most beloved celebrity. England have reached the final of a major soccer tournament. And a 43-year -old Frenchman with a background in sketch comedy is touted as potentially the next James Bond.

The idea that Omar Sy, from the concrete-block suburbs of Paris, could slip into 007’s tuxedo sounds absurd (James Bond has to be “British”, even when played by an Irishman). Unless, that is, you’re among the estimated 76 million Netflix subscribers to have watched Sy star in Lupin, the French action thriller that has become as one of lockdown’s biggest hits.

Lupin has everything. It is based (albeit very loosely) from a beloved historical novel. And it brims with daring heists, ambitious set-pieces and family drama. But in one respect it is very different from other shows that have similarly caught the public imagination across the past 18 months – the Nicole Kidman-Hugh Grant two-hander, The Undoing, say. Or Kate Winslet’s Mare of Easttown. And that is, of course, the fact the dialogue is entirely French.

Foreign language television used to be a niche interest within niche interest. Cineastes could always point to European cinema as superior to Hollywood (and to the perpetually woebegone British movie industry). However, the same mystique was not attached to television from France, Germany or Spain – much less far-flung imports from Israel, Japan or Korea. If it wasn’t in English, went the stereotype, it wasn’t worth watching.

That is no longer the case and the phenomenal popularity of Lupin can be regarded as just the latest example of non-English television eclipsing rival output from America or Britain.

The cast of French comedy Call My Agent!

France, in particular, is having a moment. Lupin arrives on the heels of Call My Agent!, another smash for Netflix which poked hilarious fun at life among Paris’s influencer class. The setting is an a-lister agency, whose clients include Charlotte Gainsbourg and Monica Bellucci (playing heightened themselves). A UK remake is in the works – but it will be doing well to rival the soufflé of delight that is the original.

Also waving Le Tricolore is The Bureau, a murky espionage caper on Amazon Prime (via its Starz channel). As with Call My Agent!, the ingredients are familiar – it is a tale of sleuthing and cahooting within the French equivalent of the FBI – but the execution quite dazzling. And certainly more intriguing than the fodder often churned out by American network TV.

There has obviously been a “buzz” around foreign television going back to the arrival on our screens of Scandi noir in the early 2000s. However, cool-to-the-touch whodunits such as The Bridge and The Killing were, in some ways, a genre unto themselves. And their settings – bleak, damp, Northern European – had a certain baked-in familiarity. If technically “foreign” they were not especially exotic (unless the seductive knitting patterns counted).

This current new wave of unmissable, post-Scandi TV represents something new. For one thing, it is truly global. Before Lupin, Netflix’s biggest non-English series was La Casa de Papel, aka Money Heist, from Spain. And the service has come up trumps with Dark, a daring slab of Teutonic sci-fi that felt like Strange Things with script notes by Friedrich Nietzsche.

Streaming TV has had huge success, too, with programming from the Far East. South Korea’s Kingdom wrested from the Walking Dead the title of the world’s best zombie romp. And the vogue for Japanese "anime" cartoons has little sign of slowing.

What has changed? The simple answer is streaming. During lockdown, especially, we’ve turned to Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney + for escapism from the New Normal. 

In the UK alone Netflix’s subscriber numbers increased 34 percent to over eight million in 2020. In Ireland, subscriber numbers were estimated at 550,000 last August, with 14 percent of respondents saying they had started using the service “recently” – indicating a large Covid uptick.

And it turns out streaming broadens our TV palette. Lupin isn’t simply Netflix’s biggest foreign language hit of 2021 – it is the service’s most watched new drama full stop (its 76 million viewers close behind behind 2020’s mega-hit Bridgeton’s and its 82 million sets of eyeballs).

Netflix is investing heavily in European television. It has established a European production hub in Madrid, and will be mindful of the EU’s audiovisual media service directive which states European content must account for at least 30 per cent of titles on video-on-demand platforms such as Netflix and Amazon.

Fauda: a Netflix success

Israel has meanwhile emerged as another hotbed of cutting edge television, with dramas such as Fauda (Netflix), Beauty and the Baker (Amazon Prime) and Srugim (Amazon Prime) winning a large international following.

The inventiveness of Israeli television has been an open secret within TV for many years. Homeland, In Treatment and Euphoria are among the “prestige” hits adapted from Israeli source material.

Asked why Israel has become such a font of excellence, insiders point to the fact that TV producers there are forced to make a little go a long way. Lacking extravagant budgets, they must rely on whip-smart scripts and an innovative premises.

“Israel is so small, it can’t support separate film and television industries, and while there are a handful of directors who work only in films, most directors and all actors and crew members go back and forth between film and television,” Hannah Brown, of The Jerusalem Post, told me last year.

“They have filmed entire seasons of Fauda for the same budget as one episode of an American TV series. That’s true of many Israeli series. They make do with what they have,” added Jessica Steinberg, of The Times of Israel.

It also helps that “traditional” television seems to be running dry of ideas. In the United States, there is a reluctance to try anything new. Consider that many of the most-anticipated shows of the next 12 months are attempts to cash in on the now dissipated hype around Game of Thrones. These include Amazon’s Lord of the Rings sequel and its adaptation of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time. Likewise in the works are HBO’s Thrones prequel House of the Dragon and Apple’s retelling of the Isaac Asimov Foundation space-opera novels (shot at Troy Studios in Limerick).

These may or may not capture the zeitgeist as Game of Thrones did. But they are unlikely to blossom into global sensations in each and every case. That’s because audiences have moved beyond dragons and gratuitous nudity. They are looking for something else. And right now that something else is savvy, sophisticated television that is easy to watch but which has an emotional core. And it turns out that it is foreign language favourites such as Lupin and Dark which have best cracked that code.

Mind Your Language: Five Foreign Hits to Discover and Binge 

Kingdom (Netflix): A zombie horror set in medieval Korea. Both a taut chiller and a crash-course in Asian history.

Tehran (Apple TV +): An Israeli agent is cut loose in Iran and must slip free of the secret police and make her way home.

Dark (Netflix): A small German town is at the centre of a string of freak experiments that have caused the timeline to bend and perhaps even to break outright.

Godzilla Singular Point (Netflix): If Kong Vs Godzilla whetted your appetite for giant lizards, this new Japanese series brings additional Godzilla lore – while re-introducing the beloved robot character of Jet Jaguar.

Zero Zero Zero (Now TV): A globe-trotting affair, this Italo-American production draws connections between drug traffickers in Calabria, narco terrorists in Mexico and white collar criminals in the United States