Happy Friday! This week’s “global TV to watch” includes thriller series from French-speaking Canada, South Korea, and the UK that you can stream for free in the US (and elsewhere).
Over this past week I’ve experienced a number of thrills, some welcome, others not so much, like the crazy storm (but no tornado!) that knocked out power across a wide swath of this region. Which got me thinking about television thrillers, including the three below.
The K2 (South Korea)
Schemers gonna scheme, and there’s plenty of scheming in romantic action thriller The K2. Particularly adept at this is Choi Yoo-jin (Song Yun-ah, Graceful Friends), the wife of presidential candidate Jang Se-joon (Jo Sung-ha, Agency) and the owner of JSS Security. Ruthless and hungry for power, she uses his illegitimate (and psychologically-damaged) daughter, Anna (Im Yoon-ah, Big Mouth), to blackmail and control her philandering husband. Witnessing one of his trysts is “Kim Je-ha” (Ji Chang-wook, Backstreet Rookie, Lovestruck in the City), the alias of a former military special ops agent, who becomes Yoo-jin’s enemy #1 and then her ally (for a while). She hires him, now code-named K2, to be Anna’s bodyguard in order to keep a tight grip on Anna and keep her out of sight (lest the media find out about her and Se-joon gets disgraced). Cue the burgeoning relationship and sticky love triangle.
With this job, Je-ha sets in motion his own scheme, as he has a massive grudge against Se-joon’s political rival, Park Kwan-soo (Kim Kap-su, Hospital Playlist). Meanwhile, Kwan-soo is in cahoots with Yoo-jin’s half-brother, Choi Sung-won (Lee Jung-jin, The King: Eternal Monarch), who’s scheming against her. In their midst is Yoo-jin’s personal assistant, Kim Dong-mi (Shin Dong-mi, The Good Detective), whose loyalty makes her someone folks should fear. And all of this is just the half of it!
All 16 episodes of The K2 are currently available for free, on-demand streaming in the US on Tubi. Ad-free streaming is currently available in the US and other territories on Netflix.
Outbreak (Canada)
The storyline of Outbreak, a Quebecois medical thriller, is coincidental to the real-life coronavirus outbreak of 2020, as the series was already produced. But the timing of the premieres of the then-new show’s episodes seemed eerily prescient: They began airing in Canada as Covid-19 infections were increasing, and the series concluded as much of the world went into lockdown.
The show follows Anne-Marie Leclerc (Julie Le Breton, True North), an infectious disease doctor and the director of the Emergency Public Health Laboratory, where she and her colleagues work to identify the causes of public health emergencies and support the authorities in defusing crises related to food poisoning, infectious diseases, and even bioterrorism. While biking to work one morning, she has a spill when an errant ferret crosses her path. Meanwhile, a virus is spreading and people are getting sick across Montreal, setting the stage for an epidemic — but no one realizes it yet…
Outbreak is currently available for free, on-demand streaming in the US exclusively on Crackle.
Thriller (UK)
As recently as a couple of months ago, the 1970s British anthology series Thriller (not to be confused with the 1960s same-named series hosted by Boris Karloff) was airing in select markets on broadcast TV, but as far as I can tell, it’s off-air now. (Thank goodness for streaming!) The series, which looks every bit the decade in which it was produced, from the bell bottoms to the big hair, consists of 43 self-contained, suspense-filled episodes — from psychological thrillers and whodunits, to the occasional tale of the supernatural. While episodes are set in the UK, their casts are filled with British and American actors.
Check out Oscar® winner Helen Mirren (The Queen) in the episode “A Coffin for the Bride” (Season 3, Episode 1), which also features Josephine Tewson, better known as neighbor Elizabeth in the hilarious classic Britcom Keeping Up Appearances. Other actors from either side of the pond to appear in the series include Francesca Annis (Home Fires), Jenny Agutter (Call the Midwife), Alun Armstrong (Breeders), Polly Bergen (The Winds of War), Lynda Day George (Mission: Impossible), Bradford Dillman (Murder, She Wrote), Michael Kitchen (Foyle’s War), Donna Mills (Knots Landing), Patrick Troughton (Doctor Who), and Peter Vaughan (Game of Thrones), amongst many others.
All six seasons of the UK version of Thriller are currently available for free, on-demand streaming in the US on Freevee, Plex, Pluto TV, and Tubi. Ad-free streaming is currently available in the US on the Shout! Factory TV channel.
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