Il silenzio dell'acqua

Let me confess right off the bat, that I gave up on The Silence of Water after 4 tedious episodes. My ideal tv show is a tight police procedural with interesting characters, smart plots and clever dialogue. This series has none of that. Instead, it is a soap opera with melodramatic characters who are constantly yelling, crying and brooding, while the actual plot proceeds at a snail's pace. None of the characters are very likable or interesting, and what passes for police procedures bears no resemblance to the real world. Compared to a good Italian tv series like The Bastards of Pizzofalcone, this show compares very unfavorably.

This is the usual second rate European Soap Opera offering that one finds on the streaming service, Walter Presents. There are the usual characters and events commonly associated with Italian Soaps e.g Priest, Mafia type gangster, charming village, beautiful people etc. There is a lot of crying in almost every scene, shouting, and women getting slapped about. The Chief Inspector character goes to work in a tank top and very tight jeans, and high heels. There is the usual staring into space, and incessant brooding by all characters. As has been pointed out, the procedure used to solve the cases bear no resemblance to how things are done in the real world. Overall, this is just a rubbish series. The 3/10 is for the beautiful seaside scenery!

But by the 4th episode, it began to drag. I correctly guessed the culprit by the 2nd ep, but not the motive. All the suspects acted suspiciously and were evasive and if they all had told the truth at the beginning, they wouldn't have wasted the police department's time, but alas, there wouldn't have been 8 eps. The flashbacks of the female detective, while an interesting but superficial connection to the victim, were too repetitive to have any importance to the story or case.

For all the westerners who refer to this as an Italian soap opera I'm guessing they've never seen a Fellini Film. Almost all Italian movies take the histrionics to the stratosphere. Ànd most British police procedurals make sleeping through a couple of episodes a way of tighten up a plot.

I like the challenge of shedding my biases a fun way of discovering new shows.

I'm not saying there weren't a few slow spots. But the human, familial experience isn't done better elsewhere. It's just done at a lower volume on this side of the Atlantic. As for the plots for either season, I enjoyed that the WHO in the who done it was not predictable. Originality is something America has lacked since reality TV became a catch phrase to define The Real World on MTV.