A Netflix gem caught our eye.
"Lilyhammer" may never find the worldwide audience of, for example, the boring German TV murder mystery series "Derrick". But then it is also unlikely we will get any bad surprises of the caliber of "Derrick", whose star turned out to have been a member of the Nazi Waffen SS.
So, Netflix peeps, get Lilyhammer out! BBC4 is fine but the rest of the world is waiting.
Isn't Lillehammer, Norway, going to host the Winter Olympics again soon? What are you waiting for?
The story premise of a mobster from New York going to Lillehammer is witness protection at its finest, and the Norwegian creators and actors prove that judicious sub-titles can go a long way.
Steven van Zandt brings his Soprano sensibility to the country on the northern edge of Europe and - spoiler alert - even does a Sinatra impression in one show of the first season.
Given that it is extremely easy to utterly mess up the "shady stranger arrives in a small town in a foreign country" baseline, Lilyhammer is remarkable. Of course, there are broad brush moments and there is slapstick but there is an understanding between the audience and the makers and actors. The kind of understanding you can feel when a grandmother is telling a story to a bunch of children, all of them sitting in a cabin around a fire on a dark, snowy winter night.
If you still need an incentive to watch Lilyhammer, there is an early scene showing recent immigrant Giovanni Henriksen and two Norwegian buddies hunting down a wolf that mauled the pet sheep of a boy. Stumbling about the dark forest, gesturing, listening intently, they track down the wolf.
Then the camera shifts downward from the face of one protagonist to reveal the radio tracking device in his hands.
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