Dogs of Berlin
Airdates

When’s that show you mentioned starting, TMINE? Including Kidding, Blood, My Brilliant Friend and Acceptable Risk

Every Friday, TMINE lets you know when the latest TV shows from around the world will air in the UK

Oops. I forgot I’d bookmarked a few shows last week and forgot to include them, so let’s play catch-up this week. There haven’t been any new acquisitions this week, but we do have a lot of premiere dates. One change is that Das Boot is no longer going to air from November 23, but from a later date instead.

What I massively overlooked is that Walter actually unleashed three new French shows on us without notice last Friday: Duel En Ville, Contact and State Conspiracy. That’s on top of Japanese-American chiller Crow’s Blood. It’s also picked up for airing at some point Shades of Guilt:

Premiere dates

My Brilliant Friend

My Brilliant Friend (US: HBO; UK: Sky Atlantic)
Premiere date: Monday, November 19, 9pm

My Brilliant Friend is HBO’s first foreign language mini-series, and is based on Elena Ferrante’s bestselling book of the same name. Set in a dangerous and fascinating Naples, the story follows the lives of two girls over six decades of their friendship. After receiving a phone call, Elena Greco discovers the most important and significant figure in her life, Raffaella ‘Lila’ Cerullo, has gone missing.

Knowing this disappearance has been a long time coming, Elena, now a writer, finally sits down to put the story of their intertwining lives on paper, starting from the 1950s where the two first met at school, in an attempt to describe the mystery of Lila – her brilliant friend, and in a way, worst enemy.

Blood
© 2018 Company Pictures

Blood (Ireland: Virgin Media Television; UK: Channel 5)
Premiere date: Monday, November 19, 9pm

Blood explores family, memory, and the impact the past can have on the present. Cat Hogan is an isolated woman on the run from her past, a past she is forced to confront when the sudden ‘accidental’ death of her mother, Mary, draws her back to the family she has spent the last ten years trying to avoid. Cat has always been the black sheep of the family and now this uncomfortable reunion awakens sinister demons from the past and shines a suspicious light on her mother’s death. However much she wants to believe her death was innocent, her suspicions start to mount against her father when she begins to notice discrepancies in his stories.

Set over the week following Mary’s death, Cat tries to uncover the truth, looking to the past to understand the present. The audience will constantly question whether Cat is paranoid or has in fact discovered a terrible truth about her father. Nothing and no one can be taken at face value. In Blood, the ‘truth’ depends on who you ask. The six episode drama series, penned by Sophie Petzal, stars Adrian Dunbar, and the cast also includes Carolina Main, Ingrid Craigie, Diarmuid Noyes, Gráinne Keenan, Cillian Ó Gairbhí and Mark O’Regan.

Jim Carrey in Kidding

Kidding (US: Showtime; UK: Sky Atlantic)
Premiere date: Thursday, November 29

Jim Carrey plays a beloved children’s TV host whose life falls apart when one of his children is killed in a car accident. Carrey’s character bottles up all his emotions and the question is: when is he going to explode.

I never found out, as I gave up after the second episode. To me, it was just sad things happening to nice people, rather than anything that was actually funny. But not a bad show, and one that’s got a great cast.

Episode reviews: 1, 2

Acceptable Risk

Acceptable Risk (Ireland: RTÉ; UK: Universal)
Premiere date: Thursday, December 6, 9pm

Acceptable Risk tells the story of Sarah Manning, who, following the murder of a husband, comes to realise that she knows nothing about his past. While coping with her grief in her home in Dublin, Sarah questions who Lee actually was and what he did in his work for a powerful global organization. And why did Lee, a salesman, need to carry a gun?

The growing suspicion that Lee’s death may be connected to the death of her first husband leads Sarah to confront a powerful conspiracy of corporate, police and political interests, extending from Dublin to Montreal, in which her own family may be complicit. The drama stars Elaine Cassidy. Angeline Ball, Morten Suurballe, Lisa Dwyer Hogg and Geordie Johnson.

Dogs of Berlin

Dogs of Berlin (Netflix)
Premiere date: Friday, December 7

After the death of a renowned German-Turkish soccer player, two very different cops each face off against the German underworld, and each is forced to face their own criminal activities. Fahri Yardim (The Physician) plays policeman Erol Birkan, and Felix Kramer (Dark) plays rival cop Kurt Grimmer. Netflix says: “This show is: gritty.” Gosh.

The Hook up Plan

Plan Coeur (The Hook-Up Plan) (Netflix)
Premiere date: Friday, December 7

In a misguided attempt to build up perpetually single Elsa’s confidence, her friends hire a male escort. A comedy series set in Paris starring Marc Ruchmann, Zita Hanrot and Sabrina Ouazani.

Champaign ILL

Champaign ILL (YouTube Premium)
Premiere date: Friday, December 12

After the death of their best friend, a wildly famous rap icon, Alf and Ronnie lose their lavish lifestyle and are forced to return home to Champaign, Illinois. In order to get back what they’ve lost, they must figure out how to leave their destructive behavior behind and get back on top. Stars Adam Pally and Sam Richardson and guest stars Jay Pharoah.

Kingdom

Kingdom (Netflix)
Premiere date: Friday, January 25 2019

Korean drama in which as deceased king rises and a mysterious plague begins to spread. The prince must face a new breed of enemies to unveil the evil and save his people.

Kriger (Warrior)
Airdates

When’s that show you mentioned starting, TMINE? Including Gladbeck, Berlin Station, People Of Earth, Kriger and Das Boot

Every Friday, TMINE lets you know when the latest TV shows from around the world will air in the UK

A great big splurge of acquisitions this week, with Sky Witness picking up ABC (US)’s The Rookie, Universal picking up CBC (Canada)’s The Coroner, and Fox UK picking up TBS (US)’s People of Earth. Only the last of those came with a premiere date, which you’ll learn in just a mo.

Otherwise, a bumper crop of premiere dates for you this week for previous week’s acquisitions.

Premiere dates

Gladbeck

Gladbeck (54 Hours: The Gladbeck Hostage Crisis) (Germany: ARD; UK: BBC Four)
Premiere date: Saturday, October 20, 9pm

As life slows down on a hot summer’s day in 1988, an armed bank robbery goes awry. While fleeing from the police, the two gangsters take an entire busload hostage. The ensuing manhunt, however, turns into a disaster. The police make fools of themselves with their amateurish operations and, above all, are obstructed by the nation’s media who swoop down on the events in their rat race for the juiciest pictures and live interviews with the kidnappers. As Rösner, the driving force of the duo, orchestrates their 54 hours of fame in cold blood, his accomplice Degowski derives sinister pleasure from manipulating the media. But Degowski is also unpredictable and violent. When he loses his nerve and kills a teenage passenger in the bus, the two men choose two young women as their hostages while leaping into another getaway vehicle. Thus begins an odyssey that goes completely out of control…

Berlin Station

Berlin Station (US: Epix; UK: More4)
Premiere date: Thursday, October 25, 9pm

Slightly touristy, slightly ridiculous adaptation of Olen Steinhauer’s novel that sees American spy Richard Armitage (ho, ho) travelling to German to use his superior German skills (ho, ho) to sniff out a mole at the US embassy. Is it his American mentor Rhys Ifans (ho, ho), maybe?

It’s pure bobbins that’s somehow made it through to three seasons, thanks to the gloss of its European setting and starry cast. I wouldn’t advise watching.

Episode reviews: 1-2

People of Earth

People Of Earth (US: TBS; UK: FOX UK)
Premiere date: Tuesday, October 30, 10:30pm

Former Daily Show correspondent Wyatt Cenac is a cynical magazine journalist, sent to cover an “alien abductees survivors group” where he soon begins to realise that those vivid hallucinations of talking deer might be a sign that he, too, has been abducted. So he decides to stay in town and see if he can work out what’s really happening and whether an alien invasion is really underway.

The show is a 50/50 split between two strands. The first strand is the desperately unfunny goings on at the support group, which reminds you of Go On but with Cenac’s deadpan instead of the jokes and Matthew Perry’s sardonic quips.

The second is with the aliens themselves – for they are real – where the show is actually a properly funny workplace comedy. Yes, that’s right – a workplace comedy. I mean have you ever considered how much effort goes into faking those cover-ups?

Unfortunately, the aliens begin to occur less and less as the season goes on, so the jokes become fewer and fewer. So I gave up.

Episode reviews: 1-3, 4, 5, 6

Kriger (Warrior)
Danica Curcic, Dar Salim and Lars Ranthe in Kriger (Warrior)

Kriger (Warrior) (Denmark: TV2; UK: Netflix)
Premiere date: November 13 [via]

Six-part Danish drama  about communities, loyalty and betrayal among war veterans, bikers and police officers, intertwined with a love story between war veteran CC (Dar Salim) and police officer Louise (Danica Curcic).

CC is back home in Denmark after active service in several war zones, and is haunted by his last mission which went horribly wrong when his best friend, Peter, was killed in action. CC is plagued by guilt and can’t find a place for himself in a society that prefers to forget about the war. To ease his conscience, he helps Peter’s widow, police investigator Louise, who has a particular interest in gang crime and, in particular, rocker king Tom (Lars Ranthe).

Das Boot

Das Boot (The Boat) (Germany: Sky Deutschland; UK: Sky Atlantic)
Premiere date: Friday, November 23 (I think)

Eight-hour miniseries sequel to Wolfgang Petersen’s Oscar-nominated 1981 anti-war classic movie of the same name. With the Allies having cracked the German military’s Enigma code and being able to track the movement of its submarine fleets, serving on a German U-boat has become little more than a suicide mission. The new series follows the crew of an ill-fated submarine that launches on its inaugural mission from Nazi-occupied France, as well as the stories of the family and friends they leave behind and that of French resistance fighters taking on the Nazi regime from the inside.

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