Summer languor has set in on the TV calendar this July, as House of the Dragon and Love Island USA—but little else—have captivated viewers fresh off June’s The Bear binge. Yet there are still standouts to be found this month, especially for the internationally minded, from a Japanese reality show and a prestige food series hosted by a world-famous Danish chef to an irreverent adaptation of an Italian literary classic and a gripping, near-future political thriller from Norway. Closer to home, a Baltimore-based murder mystery brings Natalie Portman to TV.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]The Boyfriend (Netflix)
Most dating show participants are so randy that Netflix has an entire franchise, Too Hot to Handle, premised on challenging its cast of sexed-up singles to build romantic connections without hooking up. The platform’s new reality series The Boyfriend is different—and not just because, in a first for Japanese television, its cast is made up entirely of queer men. Like Terrace House before it, this dating show simply moves nine people looking for love into a nice house and lets us look on as they get to know each other, with only the lightest pressure to pair off. Working in twos on a coffee truck gives prospective partners a chance for some alone time.
But the emphasis here is on emotional rather than physical intimacy. There are crushes, rivalries, changes of heart that will make you want to throw stuff at the screen. But what’s radical is the show’s portrayal of gay and bisexual men—in a country that has yet to legalize same-sex marriage—as regular guys in search of a soulmate. While the panel of outside commentators that is a convention of Japanese reality TV feels as unnecessary as ever, the portraits The Boyfriend paints of men opening up about their pasts, testing their compatibility, and simply navigating their lives as members of an increasingly visible LGBTQ community are indelible.
The Decameron (Netflix)
The consensus interpretation of The Decameron has long been that it illustrates the unique power of storytelling to buoy humanity through history’s most devastating moments. The author Rivka Galchen sums up this reading in her introduction to The Decameron Project: “Reading stories in difficult times is a way to understand those times, and also a way to persevere through them.”
Kathleen Jordan, the creator of Netflix’s The Decameron, came away from her pandemic-era reading of Boccaccio with a very different understanding. What if, her black comedy proposes, the book’s true timeless message is that, whether they’re Florentine aristocrats in 1348 or Manhattan financiers in 2020, the privileged will always blithely abandon their less fortunate neighbors when the plague comes to town? Jordan has stripped The Decameron of its stories, choosing instead to riff on the frame narrative. Somehow, her irreverence pays off. [Read the full review.]
The Fortress (Viaplay)
Considering the state of the world, isolationism might sound awfully attractive to a certain sort of person in a safe, prosperous country. But what happens when you’ve built walls, severed geopolitical ties, learned how to live without imports… and then it’s your supposed paradise that gets hit with a sudden disaster? That is the terrifying question that propels this Norwegian political thriller, set in a near-future Norway roughly a decade after the nation locked down its borders and diverted resources to self-sufficiency while the (unseen) rest of the world burned.
It’s 2037, and a bacterium is infecting salmon—the country’s staple protein—cultivated near the city of Bergen. At first, this is a headache for Esther Winter (Selome Emnetu), a leader of the Food Safety Authority. Then the affliction spreads, with shocking speed, to humans. Alternating between Norwegian and English, The Fortress also follows the unfolding crisis from the perspectives of the PM’s young speechwriter Ariel Mowinkel (Succession alum Eili Harboe) and a refugee from the UK, Charlie Oldman (Russell Tovey, recently seen in Feud: Capote vs. the Swans), who hopes to be granted asylum in Norway with his wife and daughter. The episodes are smartly written, effectively acted, thrillingly fast-paced, but what’s most remarkable about the series is the case it makes for international cooperation in a time of rising nationalist sentiment.
Lady in the Lake (Apple TV+)
Lady in the Lake takes the shape of a neo-noir whodunit. But hidden within that shadowy aesthetic is, among other compelling themes, an ambitious deconstruction of the genre. The femmes fatales, the victims, and the heroes are the same people; both of the leads, The Queen’s Gambit breakout Moses Ingram’s Cleo Johnson and Natalie Portman’s Maddie Schwartz, contain all of those archetypes, yet neither understands the person she really is. Though she sometimes errs toward the dreamy and diaphanous at the cost of coherence, creator, writer, and director Alma Har’el (Honey Boy) mostly manages to do justice to her uncommonly complicated characters without sacrificing the wild plot twists or binge-inducing suspense that are among the pleasures we expect from this type of show. [Read the full review.]
Omnivore (Apple TV+)
If you loved Salt Fat Acid Heat or you’ve been waiting for someone to make Waffles + Mochi but for adults, Omnivore could be your new favorite show. Narrated and executive produced by René Redzepi, the chef behind the internationally renowned Copenhagen restaurant Noma, the documentary series travels all over the world, profiling a different ingredient—from coffee to corn to tuna—in each of eight episodes.
Different subjects dictate different approaches. The premiere takes on chiles in a gutsy trek up the Scoville scale, from paprika producers in Serbia to the Tabasco factory in Louisiana to sweaty, pepper-fueled feasts in Bangkok. An episode devoted to the pig zooms in on the Spanish village of La Alberca, which cultivates not just Iberian ham, but also respect and gratitude toward the animals that, in more ways than one, keep the town fed. While Redzepi’s monologues can sometimes get a bit florid, they complement the show’s ruminative, cinematic style, supplying fascinating food facts and deep cultural context.
