Review | What to stream this weekend: in Van der Valk season 3 on BBC First, cynical Dutch detective and his rule-bending team return
- Van der Valk (played by Marc Warren) is back for a new season of crime solving, joined by new recruit Sergeant Citra Li, played by Django Chan-Reeves
- Meanwhile, on Netflix, three clueless teenagers find themselves in a love triangle mixed with some time travelling in K-drama A Time Called You
Looted treasures from the Dutch East Indies vex the Netherlands’ most famous detective (even though he speaks in English) in Van der Valk (BBC First).
Gruff, tough, cynical and allergic to smiling, Commissaris Simon “Piet” Van der Valk (Marc Warren) has returned to revel in a third three-part series of feature-length investigations.
Here the teasing, labyrinthine cases feature passion gone awry; restitution and historical wrongdoings, close to home as well as in distant Indonesia; and black magic, which is implicated in the murder of a terrified Aleister Crowley devotee: “death by demon”, an unimpressed Van der Valk calls it.
Two new recruits are welcomed to the plain-clothes, rule-bending team, including Django Chan-Reeves as Sergeant Citra Li, a smart, ambitious young officer who was previously – ahem – stuck in Traffic.
Even her abrasive new boss is impressed by her clue-cracking flair, as is colleague and maverick pathologist Hendrik Davie (Darrell D’Silva) – if not by her saxophone playing.
Created by British (with possible Dutch antecedents) novelist Nicolas Freeling, Van der Valk first famously played on 1970s television – when it was also famously overshadowed somewhat by public adoration of its theme tune.
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And Van der Valk remains an exception to the unofficial rule that a decent series (or film) should never be remade because it has no chance of living up to its original iteration.
Either way, the series’ most photogenic character remains – no contest – Amsterdam, which is probably why the evocative prospects of canals, wonky bridges and expensive, lurching mansions aren’t overdone.
The story’s the thing in each episode, and with each story the new-look team cements that elusive ability, not guaranteed in any television show, to make the viewer care about it and its components.
Going Dutch has rarely been such a treat.
Future shock in Korean drama A Time Called You
Were late 1990s South Korean teenagers physiologically devoid of raging hormones?
Where love and lust are concerned, A Time Called You (Netflix) offers a trio of the doziest teens never to figure out who exactly has the hots for whom, while they bumble along in a platonic three-way seemingly set beneath a permanent cherry blossom spring.
If this is a love triangle it must be the first with three seriously obtuse angles; then again, the female of the three, Kwon Min-ju (Jeon Yeo-been), does make an inadvertent joke by asking herself: “Is it like a pyramid scheme or something?”
Diffident Min-ju, 18, is a surprise choice of crush for Jung In-gyu (Kang Hoon), not least because she’s exclusively doe-eyed about In-gyu’s best friend, Nam Si-heon (Ahn Hyo-seop), who doesn’t care for her romantically. But this is just the beginning of the confusion.
This 12-part remake of Taiwanese hit Someday or One Day starts with Han Jun-hee (also Jeon) still heartbroken, a year on, over the loss of boyfriend Koo Yeon-jun (also Ahn) in a plane crash. His body was never recovered, so she desperately hopes he might be alive.
Her obsession feeds into a fevered dream in which she may or may not become Min-ju – whose preoccupation with Si-heon may or may not be a delirious reflection of the older Jun-hee’s relationship with the lost Yeon-jun … 25 years into the future.
After a plodding prologue peppered with dreary reminiscences the series suddenly changes gear, halfway through episode two, with the discovery of a photograph purporting to show the timid teens outside a record shop.
This is a pointer to other, associated mysteries, such as the identity of the limping stalker targeting Jun-hee. Could the picture be the key to the entire, time-slip conundrum? Or just a red herring of a B side?
