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’s wild western mountains.
‘Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials’
Chris Chibnall is known for creating the dark crime drama “Broadchurch” and serving as showrunner on three seasons of “Doctor Who.” His loose adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1929 novel, “The Seven Dials Mystery,” feels a little like a cross of those earlier shows. (Chibnall wrote “Seven Dials” and was an executive producer; Chris Sweeney directed it.) There is an emphasis on jokey humor, in the “Doctor Who” 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 “Broadchurch.” 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.)
There are compensations, though, some of which involve seeing Netflix’s 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’s manhandling of the plot meant that a crew and actors were sent to Málaga, Spain, so that two scenes could be shot in the ridiculously picturesque village of Ronda.
McKenna-Bruce’s performance as the dogged Bundle is a bit more dogged than you might like, but it’s balanced by an assured, archly funny turn by Helena Bonham-Carter as Bundle’s 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 Netflix.)
‘Jo Nesbo’s Detective Hole’
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 “The Devil’s Star” 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.
The show, a throwback to a heyday of more extreme Nordic noir, is in the same key — fastidiously gruesome, emotionally jagged, eerie for eerie’s sake. (Choice detail: the copy of the Werner Herzog memoir “Every Man for Himself and God Against All” 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’s the summer of Sven.
“Detective Hole” exhibits the genre’s 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 “The Last Kingdom”) doesn’t do much to alleviate. But the show is conspicuously polished and nice to look at — Ronald Plante did the cinematography — and it is graced with a number of distinguished Scandinavian actors, including Joel Kinnaman as Hole’s nemesis and Anders Danielsen Lie in a small, creepy part as a very controlling husband. (Streaming on Netflix beginning Thursday.)
‘Journal With Witch’
Most of the noise in the 2026 winter anime season has been made by big fantasy and science-fiction franchises like “Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End,” “Jujutsu Kaisen” and “Trigun.” 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 — the daughter of the sister she hated — when the girl’s parents die in an accident.
The not-so-great English title refers to the aunt’s suggestion that the girl keep a journal of her observations. The more suggestive Japanese title, which can be translated as “Diary From a Strange Land,” 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.
The show, whose 12th episode (of 13) premieres Sunday, treats their mutual struggles and misunderstandings seriously but lightly; Asa, who’s nosy, judgmental and excitable (to an enervating degree) but thoroughly good-natured, is a marvelous creation. (Streaming on Crunchyroll and Amazon Prime Video.)
‘Scenes After a Marriage’
Veronica Zacco was a writer for “The Bridge,” the grisly crime drama about detectives in Copenhagen and Malmo, Sweden, who worked together across the Danish-Swedish border. “Scenes After a Marriage,” her wistful mini-series about divorce from the Nordic streamer Viaplay, could not be more different from “The Bridge,” 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.
The show’s title invokes an earlier, heavier Swedish TV series about a fractured relationship, Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes From a Marriage,” while its structure — it culminates in a rendezvous on Christmas Eve, when Kian has promised to sign divorce papers — may call to mind “Love, Actually.” 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’s real hero turns out to be the pub’s preternaturally patient bartender, Bobby, an aspiring singer and actor played by Danny Saucedo, a finalist on Sweden’s “Idol.” (Streaming on Amazon Prime Video.)
‘To the Wonder’
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.
It’s 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 “All Creatures Great and Small.”
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’s utility as soft propaganda and tourism promotion. At a time when the Chinese government is putting more pressure than ever on its ethnic minorities to assimilate into the majority Han culture, “To the Wonder” 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.
It does not ignore the tensions between the Kazakhs and the Han characters, or the way the legal system chafes against the nomads’ 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 Rakuten Viki.)
