¡Acorralados!

I LOVE Italian comedy. Much funnier than most junk on American TV, where they say a lame joke, then there's a laugh track. Italian comedy moves at a much faster pace.

Usually I'm not a fan of our local productions, as (nowadays) they are a mix of bad and poorly executed. This... this I had to recommend to everyone I know. Ficarra and Picone are often fun, and here they shine! Their characters are lovable stereotypes, with the supporting cast also having good characters, and I connected a bit with Salvatore when, early on, he talked the ears off his friend by telling him about the latest episode of his favorite show, just to get complaints about having gone on for the whole morning, and that was just the first 5 minutes! I have a bit of that habit too. Anyway they get into stupid amounts of trouble, all easily avoided by having common sense, and meet characters that can only be described as "picturesque" like Useless Thing and the rest of the local mafia, or the journalist. All very humorous. Speaking of humor, I like to watch things with subtitles enabled, and can say that here (at least the subtitles) the jokes and humor is translated well enough into English, and that's important! All in all I enjoyed both seasons, plenty of laughs and all of that with a decent plot to keep it together. It's not Coliandro, but hey, not everything can be that good.

This series may have a lot of local appeal in it's native country, but it's a great example that humor does not translate well between cultures. The acting duo is bad, just bad, and the type of humor comes across as silly and stupid. Streaming services have to provide content for all its subsidiaries globally. One can only imagine that is why it is included in the lineup of one of the major streaming services.

The Italian comic duo of, Ficarra e Picone, take on the Mafia and everything that is so wrong with the Italian system, by poking fun at it and entertaining us along the way. They play bumbling Electronic Technicians who stumble upon a corpse, and from there their whole world falls apart, but in a comical way.

What Ficarra and Picone manage to do is reveal how insane and corrupt their country is. From the new-look Mafia who have to make ends meet by doing legit jobs, to the Church and their financial dealings (the monastery who don't hand out receipts for their purchased cookies), to lame news stories from the desperate media, and even throwing in cheesy TV Police thrillers that have burnt away our brain cells. The duo have fun and go to town on it, including the gender difference when committing infidelity!

It's a Sicilian farce, that only Sicilians will understand. But if you go in with the knowledge that all is not right in the sun burnt island, then you will enjoy the silly ride Ficarra and Picone have in store for you.

I watched this entire 2 season Sicilian comedy because 3 of my grandparents came to America from there and I very much enjoyed my visit to Sicily a few years ago - although I like one of the main characters can do without ricotta cheese! I also like hearing the Sicilian language which in this series is clear and well spoken. The plot of Incastrati (Framed) is quite intricate - never a dull moment. At first I was expecting a comedy in the American sense but soon decided the label "comedy" is meant in the Shakespearean way, i.e., "Framed" ("Incastrati") is not a tragedy - all's well that ends well. If you enjoyed the tv series "Monk" about an obsessive compulsive detective you might like Framed as well - a dedicated homicide detective (Agata, as in Agatha Christie perhaps?) searches for "the guy" while a meek bachelor and his feisty partner who run a small repair business together realize their romances keep going wrong. The twosome don't repair anything but they do keep their heads above water while surrounded by endlessly menacing trigger-happy Mafiosos. I was rather surprised about the plot with all its complexities but glad I watched to the end - a well-crafted mystery set in stunning locales.