Rough Diamonds (2023– )
7/10
Good European series
2 May 2023
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.
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