McMafia

It’s a testament to this series (created by Hossein Amini and James Watkins, and inspired by Misha Glenny’s book of the same name) that its seductions succeed as well as they do in overcoming its flaws. Among which we can count a pervasive tendency to moralizing babble bearing small resemblance to human discourse.

Alex, who has tried to live a by-the-book life as a businessman, gets pulled into a family crisis in a believable way that doesn’t feel like a ridiculous TV plot twist.

It's durably made, thoughtfully written and well-acted. It’s also ... methodical, to put it nicely. Others might call it plodding.

"Where is all this going and should I really care?" is the question that plagues the series, despite some compelling elements and a gifted international cast. In McMafia, the ambition is there but the interest to see it play out may not be.

While there are strong moments in this globetrotting international series, it plays like a retread of earlier mob tales -- albeit with a timely tie-in to the Russians and money laundering -- in a way that represents an offer you can safely refuse.

The larger set pieces feel reasonably well populated and a computer-assisted heist (those shipping containers, mentioned above), accomplished by minor but vividly portrayed characters, is more convincing than such sequences usually are. What's difficult is caring what happens to most of these characters for any amount of time

You'd think with all that scenically dizzying travel, the storytelling would be a little less inert. [19 Feb - 4 Mar 2018, p.15]