Two Miss Austens, Asterix & Obelix and Robot Chambermaids

New York Times

23-05-2025

In this roundup of recent series from other shores, we go tripping through time and space: from Roman Empire high jinks to Regency England melodrama, and from contemporary British mystery to a postapocalyptic Japanese hotel.
'Apocalypse Hotel'
This whimsical, oddball science-fiction anime has not ranked highly in surveys of this spring's season of Japanese animated series, perhaps because it doesn't fit precisely into a standard category. (It also has the disadvantage of being a rare original series, with no ties to an already popular manga or light-novel franchise.) In a Tokyo slowly being reclaimed by nature, on an Earth abandoned by humans because of an environmental catastrophe, an intrepid band of robots keep the lights on at a luxury hotel, prepping every day for nonexistent guests. The staff members' intelligence may be artificial, but their commitment to service is touchingly genuine.
When guests do appear — sometimes decades or even centuries apart — they are not humans but wandering aliens whose habits and needs test the robots' resourcefulness. A family of shape-shifting interstellar tanuki (raccoon dogs) decorate their rooms with towers of dung; a superpowered kangaroo with boxing gloves for paws is intent on destroying the planet's civilization, not realizing the job is already done. As the travelers and the staff adjust to one another, the robots enact their own version of exquisite Japanese tact and hospitality, with results that are both melancholy and raucously comic. (Streaming at Crunchyroll.)
'Asterix & Obelix: The Big Fight'
The tremendous success of the Asterix comics and their offshoots across more than 60 years — hundreds of millions of books sold, a panoply of movies, a popular theme park outside Paris — has never translated particularly well to the United States. The heroes of the stories, a village of 1st-century-B.C. Gauls with egregiously punny names, may hold out against Roman occupation because of the magic strength potion brewed by their druid priest. But their true power, in literary terms, is a projection of insular French wit and wordplay and rough-and-ready Gallic sang-froid. For Americans, the humor can seem both beneath our standards and over our heads.
Now that Netflix is involved, however, it is a sure bet that the intention is to cross over into as many markets as possible, not least the United States. This five-episode adaptation of an early (1966) Asterix book accomplishes that goal with sufficient style, primarily through its brightly colorful 3-D animation. The images are vivid and pleasing, and they hold your interest even when the action kicks in and the storytelling loses some of its French particularity, sliding into a Pixar-derived international-blockbuster groove. (Streaming at Netflix.)
'I, Jack Wright'
'Unforgotten,' the generally excellent cold-case crime drama created by the writer and producer Chris Lang, has been distinguished (across five seasons, with a sixth and seventh on the way) by its delicacy of tone and respect for its characters, living and dead. In his new series, 'I, Jack Wright,' Lang loosens up. The cloud of murder suspects in this nasty little British mystery, most of them members of the same family, are a lying, cheating, scrambling bunch, leaking secrets the way an old Jaguar leaks oil.
It's good if sometimes convoluted fun, as a vicious battle over a patriarch's will meshes with an endearingly frazzled detective's investigation of his death. (Our questions are multiplied by a framing device in which characters are interviewed two years later — we can see that in some cases their circumstances have changed drastically, but we don't know why.) Lang gathered an impressive cast, including Trevor Eve as the victim, Gemma Jones and Nikki Amuka-Bird as his surviving wives and John Simm as a son whose venality has a high-comic edge. (Streaming at BritBox.)
'Miss Austen'
There are two Miss Austens in this enjoyable British mini-series, shown recently as part of PBS's 'Masterpiece.' The more famous one, Jane (Patsy Ferran), is witty, sometimes difficult and mostly beloved, but in this story — adapted by Andrea Gibb from a novel by Gill Hornby — she plays second fiddle to her ferociously loyal sister, Cassandra, who is the protector of Jane and later of Jane's legacy. Cassandra's determination to keep her promises shapes her life, especially when she tells a fiancé that she will never marry should he die; Jane's impatience with what she sees as her sister's obstinacy is an uncharacteristic failure of imagination on the great novelist's part.
'Miss Austen' fills in the broad outline of the sisters' lives, in biopic style, but it is also a mystery. After Jane's death, Cassandra famously burned hundreds of her letters, and in the show's present it sketches out an explanation for why the elder Cassandra (Keeley Hawes) did not want the letters made public. This portion of the story is a little clunky and not entirely convincing. But the series is on solid ground when it flashes back (every time Cassandra rereads a letter) to the sisters' younger days. Ferran is vibrant and convincing as Jane and Synnove Karlsen is wonderful as Cassy, whose steadfastness belies a sense of humor that is every bit as sharp as her sister's. (Streaming at PBS.)