The Spanish series “When No One Sees Us,” beginning Friday on Max, is one of the better foreign-crime dramas in ages — focused, beautiful, sturdy but artful. The show is set in a small town in Spain where there is a U.S. Air Force base, and the story unfolds during Holy Week, which adds to the sense of import and impending crisis.
“No One” (in Spanish and English, with subtitles) is the tale of two cops and two investigations, one local and one foreign. Lucía (Maribel Verdú) is the Spanish cop with a testy teenage daughter, a deteriorating mother-in-law and a phone that never stops ringing. She’s looking into a startling ritualistic suicide and an emerging drug ring. Adding to her to-do list is Magaly (Mariela Garriga), a high-ranking investigator for the U.S. military, brought in to find a missing airman who might be part of an intelligence breach.
Like many fancy contemporary crime shows, some of the action here, including the denouement, unfolds during distinctive local festivals — in this case Nazarene processions, in which some celebrants don tall, pointy hoods while others carry a massive wooden float bedecked with candles and religious statutes. The show is brimming with Catholic imagery, and characters have ecstatic religious experiences, both sober and drug-induced. “Let’s go do some penance,” one guy sighs as he heads out to see his in-laws.
The show is gorgeous to behold, bright and sunny and rich in detail; people’s cars, their gaits, the way they smooth their hair down when taking off a hat, those things all add up. “No One” is also full of life and humor. A grandmother warns her granddaughter, “All men want the same thing: to complicate our lives.”
Plenty of shows have Type A female characters whose quirk is an obsession with junk food, but here that is taken to a realer and more painful place as a straight-up eating disorder. Small characters are sketched with fascinating specificity and affection, so much so that one wants to prolong the mystery just to spend more time with everyone.
There are eight episodes, satisfying and engrossing — and without that hot-boxed misery and gloom that so many crime dramas confuse for substance.
