Diamonds

Rough Diamonds is an exception to many of the recent Netflix originals. It is an excellent series, it is authentic, it has no drugs or explicit sex, and no foul language. Queenmaker was another great series with a clean ending; you don't have to wait for season 2. House of Cards, Money Heist, Delhi Crime, Queen's Gambit, Night Agent, and Marcella are good examples of what Netflix should focus on. In the past Netflix licensed excellent TV series like Revenge so that we could watch them without commercials. That was the biggest value proposition for us. Many of the recent originals are pretty bad, full of explicit sex, drugs, foul language with f and mf words. Many have actors who do not belong in the script but are there to satisfy diversity. We love the Korean, Northern European, some other foreign shows.

Have watched 6 episodes so far. Series has some good parts but many weak ones too. It's often unrealistic and far-fetched.

The actors who play Eli and Adina are quite good. The actor who plays Noah is not great, but he's really great at looking confused.

The series has several different stories taking place and some of them make no sense.

Overall, it's not easy to recommend this series as there are much better series available to watch. Hence, the series is disappointing, but could easily have been better with a better script.

One aspect of the series that is interesting is the glimpse into the workings of the world-famous diamond district in Antwerp.

This series provides a nice insight into jewish culture and into the diamond industry in Antwerp. The dense atmosphere that goes with a relatively closed culture that has it's own rules and values, is well portrayed.

But these are probably the most interesting aspects of this series. The story itself is all over the place with no clear plot in sight. There's a constant back and forth between plans, their failures, the repairs, threats that come and go. Continuous fuss on who's loving who and why or why not. It gets irritating at some point.

Acting is poor (especially the actors playing their roles in the district attorney ofices) to mediocre. Somehow you keep hanging in there waiting for a new unexpected twist in the storyline, but it never comes. There's quite a few unlikable characters her of which the female district attorney stands out. For some of the characters it's more or less clear why they have to be unlikable, for the district attorney this is unclear. Her unlikeability really has no function other than stirring up things at the office without this being needed or essential for the story.

There's the suggestions of development of the characters, but also this does not seem to go anywhere. This series has onsets to all kinds of developments in the storyline but is hardly ever able to deliver.

I liked the scenery, the insight given into a culture. Definitely not bad, but all in all just too little to justify a high rating.

The plot takes place mostly in the Antwerp diamond district, a city which I like and visited a few times. Main character Noah abandoned his orthodox Jewish family and his fiancée Gila15 years previously and events are set in motion by the suicide of Noah's younger brother, which drags him back from the UK to the uneasy relationship with his father and brother Eli. His sister Adina is the first female trader of the family and proudly so, but their business is going through a rough patch.

Noah has an unsavoury background, inclusive of a criminal mother in law named Kerra and soon everybody is thrown into shady business with drug dealers and dishonest bankers.

Throughout the story we get glimpses of the cutthroat diamond business and its diverse players, the life of women in the orthodox community and the hard life of the police that has to deal with money laundering and drug dealing. All this without any excessive violence or swearing, yet keeping a gritty edge.

So refreshing. There's something authentic about this European series that elevates it above all the US series I recently watched - and stopped watching after a few episodes. Must be because all the US series must follow a suffocating code of diversity, which often strangles the plot into a banal storylines of diverse-good/not-diverse-bad.

In this series they don't have to plant fake diverse characters, because the world shown is diverse enough to include people of different sex, ethnicity and religion.

The story and the acting are really good and convincing. I was especially moved by Marie Vinck, who plays Gila, and her chemistry with the equally talented Kevin Janssens.

Robby Cleiren (playing Eli Wolfson) and Ini Massez (playing Adina Glazer) were amazing. I really appreciated when Adina Glazer declared she is the first major female diamond trader in four generations in their community.

The series' atmosphere managed to describe dutifully the situation of the diamond industry in Antwerp as "not what it used to be", meaning that a large number of Jewish diamond manufacturers and traders have been replaced over the years by others.

My only criticism of Rough Diamonds is that Orthodox Jews in Antwerp usually do not speak with the local Antwerp accent.