Still from Unfamiliar. (Netflix.)
Parts of the new Netflix spy thriller, Unfamiliar, from Germany will probably look and feel familiar to long-time fans of The Avengers from the 1960s, which features Jonathan Steed and Emma Peel, played by Diana Rigg, with women’s dresses and men’s suits made by the hip French designer, Pierre Cardin. Unfamiliar is set in the present day and takes place mostly in Berlin, but it’s also situated in languid Morocco and evil Eastern Europe. It’s so new – it aired first in the US in February 2026— that there’s not much about it online and what’s there isn’t helpful.
Created by longtime British writer, Paul Coates, the six episodes in the series follow the machinations of Simon and Meret Schäfer (Felix Kramer and Susanne Wolff), a dangerous husband and wife team who once worked for the BND, the German Federal Intelligence Service, but who can’t go straight and stay out of trouble. Part of the appeal of the first few episodes is the mystery surrounding the characters, so there’s suspense galore. At the start, it’s not clear who the good agents are and who the bad agents are, though it gradually becomes obvious that the Russians are the really bad ones. With Putin as the new tsar, that’s all too believable.
Simon and Meret shoot to kill. They break laws, but viewers are supposed to regard them as essentially good people who are forced to do bad things to keep their little family together. Simon is a doctor who delivers babies; he also works as a chef in their upscale restaurant and hires minorities. Meret is “drop-dead gorgeous” to borrow an outdated expression that’s probably sexist. She can’t stop herself from fucking who she wants to fuck for personal gain and to save her marriage and her husband. The camera pans over her face loving and adoringly even when it’s black-and-blue and spattered with blood and bruises.
There’s nothing really working class or radical about Unfamiliar, but I like it because it updates the Avengers and turns the original clever, stylish British show into something far more sinister. Though it’s escapist, it suggests that the Cold War is alive and well in the present day. The BND – the German version of the CIA — is infiltrated by a mole for the Russians who is under the thumb of the Russian ambassador to Germany, a young woman from Moscow married to a thug and the daughter of an old Bolshevik. She looks positively Tartar and is as menacing in her own way as Meret as in hers. There’s probably too much violence on the screen, too many bullets flying through the air, and too much is made of the child that Meret and Simon steal from her mother and raise as their own daughter. The family melodrama runs neck and neck with the political thriller. I definitely recommend it.
Unfamiliar is as good as it gets from Netflix, which mass-produces films for the masses and can miss the mark as often as it hits a bull’s eye. The last episode in the series comes to a dramatic climax that makes it clear that there will be a second series. Paul Coates, who apparently walks the Yorkshire Moors when he isn’t at his computer, isn’t done with his unromantic romantic couple. Not yet. Now’s the time to climb aboard his fast-paced, character-driven, action-packed vehicle that’s bound for far more explosive scenes on the edge. Dashiell Hammett, the father of noir and the creator of Sam Spade, once said that he depicted the world as it really was, not the way it should or ought to be. He’d probably say much the same about Unfamiliar.