Belgian TV police drama. Police inspector Paul Gerardi, played by Filip Peeters, investigates the robbery of 66 safe deposit boxes at a private bank in Brussels. Created by Ward Hulselmans.

(2013 -Future Season to Follow) 1 Seasons, 12 Episodes

Available on Netflix, Netflix Streaming

Subtitled

CultTV Times’ Jayne Nelson’s review:

Riding on the coat-tails of the wave of Nordic noir drama currently doing so well in the U.K., Salamander – which has just finished airing on BBC4 – actually hails from a little further South: Belgium. Set in a rather pretty-looking Brussels, its characters speak both French and Flemish, experience the same kind of gritty, tense situations you’d find in shows such as The Killing or The Bridge, and the emphasis is firmly on solving a crime. There, however, the similarities end; Salamander is really more of a spy thriller than a police procedural, complete with earth-shaking conspiracies, double-agents and a lone lawman going on the run to find the truth. MORE…

A British psychological crime drama television series starring Idris Elba as Detective Chief Inspector John Luther and Ruth Wilson as antagonist Alice Morgan. Created by author Neil Cross.

(2010 -2013) 3 Seasons. 14 Episodes

Available on Netflix, Netflix Streaming, Amazon Prime, BBC

Inquirer Columnist Jonathan Storm’s 1st season review:

The show stars Idris Elba, who seemed like such an authentic Baltimore gangster when he played Stringer Bell in The Wire. But he’s a native Londoner, and at the television critics’ summer gathering in Los Angeles, he demonstrated that John Luther’s accent and speech patterns are also different from his own.

Elba is flat-out scary as a detective who’s too smart to fit in and too angry in the face of continual crime and depravity to care. And Ruth Wilson, who played the title character in PBS’s most recent Jane Eyre, is also flat-out scary as Alice Morgan, an astrophysicist who got her Ph.D. at 18 and comes into Luther’s life as a witness in a grim murder case.

He’s large and black, with a stubbly beard. She’s small, with alabaster skin, blue eyes, red hair, and a charming overbite. Their relationship, which lasts over the entire six-episode first season of Luther (a typical series order in Britain), is unlike any that has come before on TV. MORE…