{"id":23161,"date":"2026-04-17T14:48:38","date_gmt":"2026-04-17T22:48:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/?p=23161"},"modified":"2026-04-17T14:48:48","modified_gmt":"2026-04-17T22:48:48","slug":"unfamiliar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2026\/04\/17\/unfamiliar\/","title":{"rendered":"Unfamiliar"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/RY-FSHJ7fKA?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\n<p>This series really doesn&#8217;t kick in until the fourth episode (of six). Before that&#8230; I was wincing at some of the fights, which were extended and choreographed to the point you thought you were watching a lame kung fu movie. And the plot twists? They overtook the main plot itself. Which was not completely comprehensible and seemed trivial until the pieces fell in place halfway through.<\/p>\n<p>So&#8230; Why am I writing about an imperfect series?<\/p>\n<p>BECAUSE OF THE FEMALE STAR! Susanne Wolff as Meret Sch\u00e4fer&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Meret and her husband Simon are spies for the BND, the German intelligence agency, or they were and they&#8217;re retired but maybe they&#8217;re still active, who knows&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>And for some reason this guy Koleev&#8230; There&#8217;s this plot line all about what happened in Belarus, so Koleev is Belarusian? I mean is the BND really that concerned with that old Russian satellite? Eventually you find out Koleev is Russian, but they could have made that clear earlier, and I&#8217;m giving away nothing by telling you this, only making things more comprehensible.<\/p>\n<p>So, it&#8217;s kinda like &#8220;Godfather III,&#8221; in that Meret and Simon are dragged back in, but&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>This isn&#8217;t the typical action couple. Where the mean leads and the woman stands by and looks pretty. I won&#8217;t quite say that Meret wears the pants, but she takes initiative, she is not reluctant to enter a dicey situation, and how she behaves there&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Furthermore, Susanne Wolff is 52, actually she&#8217;ll be 53 next month, and the casting of a woman of this age in a starring role&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s not how Hollywood does it. And Wolff has not been sliced and diced to look younger than her years, she even has a scar in her chin that messes with the perfect image but makes her that much more relatable. Despite being a spy, Wolff feels real, she&#8217;s not overly concerned with her look, she&#8217;s comfortable.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, Meret is a loving mother, but she is also devious and&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>She surprises you, where she&#8217;s coming from, what she&#8217;s doing, that&#8217;s part of the essence of the show.<\/p>\n<p>But before that&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>What we&#8217;ve got here is a lot of running around, as we, the viewer, try to figure out what is really going on.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>And it&#8217;s not wholly believable, what spy show ever is? In truth, a lot of what spies\/undercover agents do is incredibly boring.<\/p>\n<p>And the actions sequences, at first, were just too over the top. But as the characters developed&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>I guess that most TV shows are about escape, that whew! moment when you&#8217;re out of harm&#8217;s way, whereas Meret is always leaning in, but unlike Sheryl Sandberg, her life is at risk and she&#8217;s not overpaid.<\/p>\n<p>As for behaving this way&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Are the Sh\u00e4fers too old for this sh*t? Have they lost their true identities over the years?<\/p>\n<p>And&#8230;underneath it all you&#8217;ve got the relationship issues between Susanne and Simon&#8230;subtle, but they&#8217;re there, like in all marriages. Have you been forthcoming, honest, have you held back information&#8230;and at what cost?<\/p>\n<p>Now &#8220;Unfamiliar&#8221; is not in the league of &#8220;Payback&#8217; and so many other shows I&#8217;ve written about, but it&#8217;s right there on Netflix and it was in the Top Ten for a while and much better to watch this than the popular dreck that drops weekly and is a part of everyday conversation.<\/p>\n<p>The imagery is rich and you feel like you&#8217;re in a foreign country, but not that you&#8217;re behind&#8230;Berlin comes across as just another metropolis where people live.<\/p>\n<p>Like I said&#8230; The fight Meret gets into in the first episode almost had me turning off the series. It wasn&#8217;t until episode four that I was truly glued to the screen. But then I definitely was, I was caught up in the tension, I wanted to see how it all played out, at that point I was totally involved.<\/p>\n<p>And that&#8217;s what I look for.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This series really doesn&#8217;t kick in until the fourth episode (of six). Before that&#8230; I was wincing at some of the fights, which were extended and choreographed to the point you thought you were watching a lame kung fu movie. And the plot twists? They overtook the main plot itself. Which was not completely comprehensible [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-television"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-61z","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23161"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23163,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23161\/revisions\/23163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}