Best shows on Walter Presents

We may not be familiar with the Brabant Killers in this country, but they were probably Belgium’s most notorious criminals, who went on a crime spree in the 1980s and yet were never caught. The involvement of corrupt gendarmerie officers was widely suspected, although this was not proved.

Against this real-life background, we meet Marc, Franky and Vicky, who are about to move to Brussels: the boys becoming gendarmerie recruits and Vicky a radical law student. But their experiences soon destroy their idealism...

Jane Rackham

This Croatian-Ukrainian drama looks at the issue of human trafficking and is, inevitably, a bleak affair. It’s well constructed, however, with characters involving enough to make it more than watchable.

A Croatian journalist forms an uneasy alliance with the police, while the Ukrainian wife of a politician hunts for her missing niece. In series two, Ukraine has been invaded by Russia, which upends everything.

Jack Seale

A Dutch political thriller with intrigue at every turn, like a naughty, pulpy Borgen. Morten Mathijsen (Peter Paul Muller) is the roguish deputy of a party with the potential to win the Netherlands’ next election. He could become a dangerously popular PM. But the women in his life — his meek, troubled wife, his wayward teen daughter, his sharp and assertive new stylist, and a young woman whose father’s death years ago is a clue to Morten’s sexy but shameful past — might bring him down. Oh, and he’s being blackmailed!

Jack Seale

From Belgium comes a thriller where plans to manipulate streams of ones and zeroes quickly end up involving bullets, explosions and running for one’s life. Alidor (Gene Bervoets), a conman fresh out of prison, hires young hacker Jeremy (Tijmen Govaerts) to intercept some of the billions that flow electronically between banks every day. If they get it right and don’t get greedy, they’ll be very rich — but Jeremy is also on a personal revenge mission, and nothing in high-stakes dramas like these ever quite turns out the way it’s supposed to.

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Back to chilly northern Finland, where life is anything but quiet. Detective Nina Kautsalo (Iina Kuustonen) is trying to lay low, but too much bad stuff is going on: Russian gangsters are marauding in the Murmansk forest or being assassinated on Finnish soil, while the cold case of a slain judo champ and the chief suspect, her ice-hockey-playing other half, has just been reanimated, 12 years after it profoundly affected Nina’s family. The game is on again.

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Danish drama fans will be cheering familiar faces throughout the first episode of this series, which delves into the country’s drug trade. A startling pre-credits flashback shows us two young brothers witnessing a traumatic event involving their father – years later when he dies, his sons (Andreas and Sebastian Jessen) are drawn back to their home town and towards the underworld their father operated in. As they come at this new life from very different directions, a crime thriller with thoughtful character notes and artful direction develops.

Jack Seale

Sara Mortensen gives a mesmerising performance as an autistic clerk in the police records department who, by chance, ends up using her puzzle-solving skills to help chaotic cop Raphaëlle Coste crack murder cases. The crimes are intriguing, but it’s the blossoming relationship between the chalk-and-cheese women that makes this so special. We also learn a lot about what it’s like being neurologically atypical. An odd-couple French drama that’s charming and fresh.

Jane Rackham

The most popular series in Denmark for 20 years, this comedy-drama is deliciously bright, breezy and beguiling. It’s 1931 and we join all the returning guests at the gorgeous beachside hotel that’s now run by good-hearted Fie (Rosalinde Mynster). A cross between a PG Wodehouse story and a French farce, it combines romance, sneaky business deals, bickering and intrigues set against the backdrop of sand dunes and big skies with writ-large characters wearing fabulous vintage costumes and delivering their lines in the most charming and amusing way. Hygge personified.

Jane Rackham

The third series of this quality German sleuther begins with a country-house mystery. Klaus Borowski (Axel Milberg) gets a surprise invitation to visit his estranged best pal. Which is strange because the men’s relationship soured some years ago when Borowski tried and failed to prove that the guy had killed his wife, but the case has now been revived in odd circumstances. Series one and two are also available on All 4 under the Walter Presents banner.

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The first Ukrainian series on Walter Presents, Hide and Seek was nominated for Best Central and Eastern European Series at the unfortunately named “Serial Killer Awards”. The 2019 series is also a cut above the average procedural, capitalising on brutalist urban landscapes and a solid central pairing to transcend the slightly familiar set-up.

In a fading industrial town, a seven-year-old girl goes missing during a round of the eponymous game with her loving but flawed father. Other children then vanish, with each disappearance followed by the release of a short video of the child holding up four numbers. Enter Varta Naumova (Yuliya Abdel Fattakh) and Maksim Shumov (Vyacheslav Dovzhenko), she remote and private, he laid-back and personable, both bearing secrets. If it’s no surprise to discover they make an effective if unorthodox team, the setting is evocatively deployed and the performances steady.

Gabriel Tate

Threatening dappled sunlight, intimidating trees, unnervingly pristine barns and squads of blonde women wearing identical white T-shirts, doing yoga in an indefinably horrifying manner: yes, it’s season two of Sweden’s stylish drama about a gated farming community that definitely has something to hide. As the cult of Jordnara deals with financial difficulties, an incident attracts the attention of the police. Every artfully shot scene has a carefully composed air of cool weirdness about it.

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Series at the classier, gloomier end of the crime drama spectrum like to show the impact of a case rippling sadly outwards, darkening everyone connected to it. This Belgian ten-parter takes that further by giving the jurors on a murder trial as much screen time as the defendant. While the story of a mum accused of killing her daughter (did she? At first, we’re nudged towards no) plays out, a dozen rain-lashed tales of festering middle-class crisis develop. One focus is on a nervy woman whose husband, as TV husbands so often are, is indefinably menacing. It’s a show full of secrets worth discovering.

Jack Seale

All three parts of the Deutschland spy series are available on Walter Presents (83, 86 and 89) and they perfectly blend a coming-of-age story with a Cold War thriller. The series tells the story of Martin Rauch, who is sent from East Germany by his aunt in the Secret Service to act as a spy in West Germany. RadioTimes.com called Deutschland 83 “an original take on a classic story”.

This soapy Dutch drama is about Steef and Rebecca, a couple who are delighted when the attractive music journalist Peter and his teacher girlfriend Eva move in next door. With themes of grief, crime and desperation, The Swingers is a domestic relationship thriller not to miss.

A young Finnish detective hunts for a serial killer in his home town, making him confront his own past in this intense crime drama. Set in a deeply religious community, the series tackles homophobia and fanaticism and, conveniently, sin.

When his adult son is found dead and his police-office old flame (Maya Sansa) gets in touch to say she doesn’t believe the official verdict of suicide, Valerio (Alessandro Gassman) must begin a process of painful rebuilding. Gorgeous cinematography that offsets profound sadnesses in the story and flashes of lyricism in the script elevate this Italian series well above the usual.

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A saga about trafficked sex workers in Amsterdam and Antwerp, this Dutch drama certainly has a difficult subject matter but doesn’t descend into grim titillation.

Instead, it neatly intertwines the lives of three disparate women: an opera singer with an errant husband and a detective for whom the case of a murdered young woman might distract from her unsatisfactory personal life are about to come into contact with a senior member of a criminal gang who is starting to doubt herself. They are carefully drawn characters in a convincingly nightmarish world.

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Sex, murder and intrigue from the Netherlands, in a thriller about a defence lawyer (Fedja van Huet) who is irreversibly drawn to a photographer (Sylvia Hoeks). She’s married to a prosecution lawyer and you might have just guessed roughly where the story’s going, but the two leads make this more believable and less melodramatic than it might be.

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This Walter Presents series based on a true-life crime details the death of Grégory Villemin, a four-year-old French boy, who was found in the Vologne River close to his home in October 1984. His parents had been receiving anonymous threats from someone called “The Crow” so the police focused on finding him (or her), but others suspected a jealous family member — the Villemins had many secrets and feuds.

Added to the tragedy is the shocking intrusiveness of the exclusive-hungry media and how incompetent or weak the investigating authorities were.

Jane Rackham

Sins of the Fathers (Odwróceni. Ojcowie i córki) is an excellent Polish gangster series set in Warsaw in the present day.

Lidka (Joanna Balasz) is a cop getting into trouble for roughing up violent criminals; Kaska (Eliza Rycembel) is a law graduate who looks set for a glamorous career. They’re linked by their dads: respectively, a retired police officer and a gangster who is meant to be retired, but whose unresolved crimes are about to tie the quartet together in unexpected ways.

The contrast between the flawed, charismatic older men and their sometimes wiser, sometimes naive children gives the hard-boiled crime action an extra dimension.

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Who killed Marianne Coens? Her stepdaughter has confessed to pushing her downstairs, but other evidence suggests the involvement of Julie’s father, Anton. She insists she acted alone, but is she just trying to protect her dad? Will they both be found guilty, or just one, or neither?

That’s the basis for season two of a fine Belgian courtroom drama, but it’s only the half of it. We spend as much time at home with the jurors as we do in court, getting to know 12 people, all with their own problems that might colour their view of the evidence. The ebb and flow of conflicting testimonies sway us and them towards different conclusions, in a clever narrative.

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In 2021, this drama swept the board at Israel’s equivalent of the Baftas — it’s roughly that country’s answer to Line of Duty, albeit with slightly more of an action-thriller vibe. Izzy (Shalom Assayag) is an idealist, an honest cop in a dishonest world. He’s wearily approaching retirement when an assassination, brazenly carried out in public, sparks an investigation that uncovers corruption and secrets at the very top of Israeli society and law enforcement — with Izzy’s friend and former partner implicated.

A world of complex, believable characters is soon sketched out.

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The lovingly realised period details may make this 1963-set Danish comedy drama a cosy watch, but it does have sharp teeth. When small-time businessman Axel (Morten Hee Andersen) becomes convinced that hair curlers are the future, it could be the last straw for his other half, Tove (Rosalinde Mynster) — or it could be the venture that makes his fortune.

The plight of women in Danish society at the time is the serious undercurrent of a show that otherwise has an infectious, freewheeling vim.

Jack Seale