Best International Series to Binge Watch Over the Holidays

For those who’ve had their fill of Hallmark movies and more traditional seasonal fare, The Hollywood Reporter‘s annual list of the best in international TV offers some binge alternatives for the lazy days between Christmas and New Year’s. There’re nary a Santa or sleighbells to be found among our picks of foreign series fare, but fans of global TV will find plenty to chew on over the holidays, whether it’s a political thriller set in Senegal, a Korean drama about mental health, or a bizarre Danish comedy-soap from an old arthouse master.

This charming and disarmingly cringe Aussie rom-com kicks off with one of the most original meet-cutes in the genre: Gordon (Patrick Brammall) stops his car to let Ashley (Harriet Dyer) cross the street. In a cheeky thank you, she flashes him some boob. Distracted, Gordon runs over a dog. Before you know it, the pair are on the hook for a massive vet bill and negotiating dog-sitting schedules.

From that premise, Brammall and Dyer, a real-life couple in addition to co-creators of the show, spin out a breezy, fun, and occasionally deep exploration of the challenges of modern-day dating that never overstays its welcome. And yes, the dog is fine.

Spy/Master (Watch on: Max)

A compelling companion piece to AppleTV+’s Slow Horses, this espionage thriller draws heavily on the John le Carré school of spy craft, where mind games and double and triple bluffs play more or a role than gunfights or car chases (though the show does occasionally indulge in those as well).

The Cold War plot has Victor Godeanu (God’s Own Country actor Alec Secăreanu) playing the right-hand man to Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and a secret KGB mole. It’s 1978 and as Ceaușescu’s paranoia reaches a fever pitch, Godeanu tries to escape, using a diplomatic trip to West Germany to attempt to defect. But with his family still in Romanian and counterintelligence breathing down his neck, he’ll need all his skills as a double agent to make it out alive.

The One in Charge (Watch on: Hulu)

This dark comedy from Argentina centers around a diabolical everyman. Eliseo, played by Guillermo Francella in a pitch-perfect performance, is a building manager, the caretaker and handyman in charge of a luxury condominium in a swanky part of Buenos Aires.

The families living in the complex trust him with their keys and their secrets and Eiliseo is oh-so willing to take advantage. What begins as a series of petty power plays soon becomes more threatening when Eliseo hears of a renovation plan that could make him redundant.

The Interpreter of Silence (Watch on: Hulu)

Set in the early ’60s, during the economic boom time in post-World War II Germany, this limited series, adapted by Annette Hess from her novel, explores the deliberate amnesia of a country trying to bury the horrors of its recent past.

Katharina Stark stars as Eva Bruhns, a young and ambitious woman with no memory of the war, who takes on a job as a Polish translator at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, the first time a German court prosecuted Germans for the crimes of the Holocaust. What she hears in testimony there will shake the foundations of her own family’s history.

Black Sands (Watch on: Viaplay)

Scandinavian streamer Viaplay will be wrapping up its U.S. service so there’s a limited window to check out its many Nordic Noir gems. Top of the list is this Icelandic crime drama, which combines an offbeat portrait of rural life — Aldís Amah Hamilton plays Eyja, a detective who flees the personal chaos of her life in Reykjavík to return to her sleepy hometown — with a gripping procedural, centered around the investigation into a serial killer whose been murdering tourists.

Fans of The Killing will enjoy the series’ slow steady pace (and Eyja’s impressive knitwear) but the real magic comes from the show’s balance of the criminal with the personal and mundane: Eyja’s snipping mother, her awkward reconnection with old school friends, her frustration at incompetent colleagues. Black Sands delivers both the drama and the thrills.

The Sea Beyond (Watch on: MHz Choice)

In Italy, The Sea Beyond is a cultural phenomenon, smashing ratings records and inspiring an army of breathless fans, who have taken to copying the music and street style of the young offenders who make up the series’ cast. Set in a juvenile detention center on the Italian coast (their barred windows look out onto the Mediterranean), The Sea Beyond has style and sex appeal to spare.

The series is more surface than substance — more The O.C. than Gomorrah — but as guilty pleasures go, you could do a lot worse than this juicy slice of Neapolitan melodrama.

Copenhagen Cowboy is everything you’d want, and expect, from a Nicolas Winding Refn Netflix series. There’s the dark saturated neon lighting and moody percussionist score (from Cliff Martinez). There’s the excessive, fetishized depiction of violence. There’s the story, a bloody tale of revenge on the seedy Danish underworld that’s more dream-like than paced or plot-y.

A refreshing change to NWR’s modus operandi comes with the casting of waif-like Rain actress Angela Bundalovic in the silent angel-of-vengeance role usually played in Refn’s films by macho male protagonists. But if you’re a NWR fan, you’re really, really going to like this.

Mystery Road (Watch on: Acorn TV)

While Acorn TV bills Mystery Road as the Australian answer to True Detective, this Down Under crime drama is closer to Reacher in its appeal, featuring a stoic, sharp-tongued Aboriginal detective Jay Swan (Aaron Pedersen) with an old-school sense of moral righteousness whose investigations into rural crime lead to confrontations with deep-set institutional racism and injustice.

At its core a hard-boiled neo-western, Mystery Road nicely balances the John Wayne-style swagger of its lead character with a clear-eyed look at the exploitation and suffering of Australia’s Indigenous population.

Wara (Watch on: MhZ Choice)

This Senegalese drama follows law professor Moutari Wara (Issaka Sawadogo) who, despite his best efforts to stay above the fray, gets drawn into political activism. When one of his fellow professors is arrested in the classroom, and when one of his students calls on him to help her battle corruption, he can’t stay on the sidelines. A top-notch political thriller that offers a glimpse into a world that U.S. audiences rarely see.

Daily Dose of Sunshine (Watch on: Netflix)

There’s no shortage of great K-dramas out there but Daily Dose of Sunshine offers something new: An earnest, but deeply realistic and empathetic look at mental health. Jung Da-eun (Park Bo-young) is a newbie nurse in a psychiatric ward, dealing with patients whose disorders range from schizophrenia and depression to panic attacks and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

With the help of head nurse Song Hyo-jin (Parasite’s Lee Jung-eun) she struggles to treat not just the conditions, but the people behind them. It’s an emotional, tear-jerky show (keep the hankies close), but lightens the drama with comic moments and deftly avoids stereotypes to give a more rounded picture of mental health.

The Night Logan Woke Up (Watch on: Netflix)

Canadian arthouse wunderkind Xavier Dolan has famously renounced cinema but this, his TV debut, shows his auteur sensibilities translate seamlessly to the small screen. This five-part mini-series was loosely adapted from a play by Michel Marc Bouchard, whose play Tom at the Farm was source material for Dolan’s 2013 feature.

The Night Logan Woke Up follows the Larouches, a dysfunctional Quebec family dealing with the death of their matriarch, played by Dolan regular Anne Dorval. The series is part melodrama, part murder mystery, as it becomes clear that events on a fateful night back in 1991 hold the secrets to the Larouche’s deep-set trauma.

Yosi, the Regretful Spy (Watch on: Prime Video)

This Argentine-Uruguayan thriller, from director Daniel Burman, is inspired by the real-life case of intelligence agents working for the Argentine Federal Police who infiltrated Argentina’s Jewish community, gathering intelligence later allegedly used to commit two of the deadliest terrorist attacks in Latin American history: The bombing of Argentina’s Israeli embassy in 1992 and the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association in 1994.

Yosi, the Regretful Spy is a work of fiction, not a docu-drama. The actual events of the 1990s remain the subject of heated debate and the perpetrators of the bombing have never been brought to justice. But the series remains a chilling, and contemporary, look at the consequences of state paranoia and institutional antisemitism.

African Folktales, Reimagined (Watch on: Netflix)

Traditional African folktales of monsters, genies, and malevolent spirits are given a contemporary reworking for new audiences in this Netflix omnibus series, featuring 30-minute shorts from South Africa, Tanzania, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, and Mauritania.

Made in collaboration with the U.N.’s cultural body, UNESCO, the collection is a sampling of sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre storytelling from African creators, with most of the shorts focused on female protagonists. As in any compilation, the results are varied, but overall, African Folktales, Reimagined is a fresh and inspiring look at the future of African storytelling.

The Kingdom Exodus (Watch on: MUBI)

With The Kingdom Exodus, Danish provocateur Lars von Trier returns 25 years later to the bizarre hospital soap opera comedy horror series he made in the mid-1990s. This five-part conclusion to the two-season run of The Kingdom, which ended without a real conclusion in 1995, dropped on MUBI earlier this year.

We’re back at Kingdom Hospital, a high-tech medical center in Copenhagen that just happens to be haunted. A surreal mash-up of Twin Peaks, The Office, and hospital melodrama, The Kingdom blends the comic, the horrific, and the downright weird in a way that is pure von Trier and unlike anything currently being made for TV.

Dom (Watch on: Amazon Prime Video)

Produced by Brazil’s Emmy-nominated powerhouse indie company, Conspiracao, this Rio de Janeiro crime thriller is based on the unbelievable true story of Victor Lomba, a young scuba diver who found his calling as a military intelligence agent fighting the war on drugs. His own son, Pedro, becomes a drug addict and then, as a dealer known as Dom, one of the most wanted criminals in Brazil. Frenetic, action-packed, and visually stunning, Dom is among the most addictive shows to come out of Latin America in years.