Diamonds

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.

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.

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.

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.

The production values are fine, the storyline is interesting, but as usual, Netflix is lax about uploading details of the cast and episodes. Netflix must improve in this area. It seems that they have no one working for them who has any knowledge of actors who are not primarily known for English language based films or TV.

The 8th episode is streaming now and still, the cast is mostly still listed without any photos or details in the episode guide. Several actors are obviously rather accomplished people in the field of European productions, to judge by their performances, but there is nothing about them in the cast listings. Viewers are left in the dark in regard to work histories and images. To say that Netflix is lax in this area is an understatement.

This is obviously not to mention that there are still no synopses for the episodes at all, 8 episodes in. Netflix is becoming well known for this laxness.