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Created by Steve Bailie, the Romanian crime series “Subteran” aims for pacey, slick thrills. There are backstabbing, double-crossing, hidden identities popping to the fore, and all kinds of revelations designed to amp up the drama. Yet why does it feel so curiously lethargic, as if the show doesn’t quite know how to direct its manipulative, confident, and scheming characters onto a riveting, cohesive course of action?

Subteran (2025) Episode 1 Recap:

“Subteran” opens in media res. A car is burnt. A woman is advised by a man to wholly disappear. There’s danger in the air. Quickly backstories are rolled out and we are introduced to who these people are. The woman is Cami Serbu (Ana Ularu). She is an It consultant. Her partner Luca has got himself in deep trouble, though he himself invites it.

The man in the first scene is Bones (Cezar Grumazescu), the working partner of Luca.

Former HBO Europe executives Jonathan Young and Ioannina Pavel have launched a new production company, May One, aiming to develop and produce high-end TV drama in Romania for local and international audiences.

The veteran TV execs have been involved in several high-profile HBO productions shot in Eastern Europe, including the award-winning Polish series Wataha (The Pack), the Romanian-German

thriller Hackerville and HBO Max’s Cold War espionage drama Spy/Master, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival last year.

Spy/Master

As vp original production at HBO Europe, Young oversaw HBO’s slate of original local language series in the region. Pavel began as a development executive at HBO Romania, working on such series as the gangster drama Umbre and Hackerville, before going on to produce a variety of shows, from the romantic drama Ruxx to Spy/Master.

May One will be based in Bucharest and plans to develop, produce and co-produce high-end series to shoot in Romania,...

HBO Europe and German broadcaster TNT Serie have released the first trailer for their six-part cyber drama Hackerville, which will also be available in the U.S.

The two broadcasters are launching the show, produced by Deutschland 83 producer Ufa Fiction and Mobra Films in November with HBO Europe airing the show in Central Europe, Scandinavia and Spain on Sunday 4 November and TNT Serie premiering the series in Germany, Austria and Switzerland on Thursday 8 November. It will also be available to U.S. HBO subscribers across HBO Go, HBO Now and HBO On Demand, although a premiere date has not been set.

Hackerville follows a network of hackers and the investigators tasked with tracking them down. It is both broadcasters’ first moves into co-productions.

It was created by Ralph Martin and Joerg Winger from Ufa Fiction and will be produced by Cristian Mungiu and Tudor Reu and exec produced by Winger and Johnathan Young.

Cable company HBO Europe has started to shoot cyber-crime thriller series “Hackerville” in Transilvania, a region of Romania, as its first international co-production, building on a string of locally shot productions, including Romania-set detective series “Umbre” (pictured).

“It will put Romania on the map of the international TV drama scene,” says co-creator and executive producer Joerg Winger (“Deutschland 83”), adding he was won over by the location “as a dynamic and colorful place with a vastly unexplored history and present.”

The project was “created in a truly multi-cultural process, with great Romanian talent attached,” Winger adds, with music a key component, as it was in “Deutschland 83,” the Cold War-set spy series for AMC Networks’ SundanceTV and Rtl Television.

The original six-part “Hackerville,” about a network of hackers and the investigators tasked with tracking them down, co-produced with TNT Serie, was created by Ralph Martin and Winger for Ufa Fiction,...

Deutschland 83, Season 1, Episode 2, “Brave Guy”

Written by Steve Bailie and Anna Winger

Directed by Edward Berger

Airs Wednesdays at 11pm (Et) on SundanceTV

After Deutschland 83‘s pilot, “Quantum Jump“, seemed to set the series up as a stylish, welterweight version of The Americans, its second episode,”Brave Guy,” establishes the show as something lighter still. And that’s not a bad thing at all.

The overall theme of “Brave Guy” is that being a spy—even a very green one—is pretty badass if you have game. And boy, does Martin (Jonas Nay) have game. The episode requires him to run, skulk, flirt, and fight his way to a hotel safe containing top secret documents, and he delivers with more pizzazz than he has a right to. It’s hard to imagine poor, morally-exhausted Philip Jennings ever enjoying such boyish enthusiasm as he cut his teeth in the...

The Musketeers picks up the slack and delivers a surprising, eventful and engaging episode in A Marriage Of Inconvenience...

This review contains spoilers.

2.7 A Marriage Of Inconvenience

Last week’s Through A Glass Darkly was a slight blip on what has been a strong season for The Musketeers and it is with some relief that A Marriage Of Inconvenience returns the series, if not to its peak, then at least some way to it.

Directed by Edward Bennett (Waking The Dead, Silent Witness) and written by, Steve Bailie (Casualty, Primeval), A Marriage Of Inconvenience is a surprising episode in that it had me raging for the first half hour, but then as the twist became more clear it forced me to see it in a new light. This was an episode that caught me unawares and I liked it the more for it.

So what was going on? Well, in...