Angela Merkel Is Solving Crimes on TV

Plucked from the bountiful fall harvest of international series, this selection of notable shows travels from the sheerly fanciful — Angela Merkel whiling away her retirement investigating small-town murders in “Miss Merkel” — to the achingly real, as survivors of the Oct. 7 attacks tell their stories a year later in the Israeli series “Picture This.”

‘The Tower’

Gray and quiet in tone, this British cop show is a little like a more serious, less amped-up “Line of Duty” and a little like a simpler, less emotionally walloping “Unforgotten.” Situating it between two of the most absorbing British crime dramas of recent years does not do this modest series (its four-episode third season concluded last week on BritBox) any favors, but it holds its own as a character piece in genre clothing.

Gemma Whelan (the seagoing Yara Greyjoy in “Game of Thrones”) stars as Sarah Collins, a by-the-book detective sergeant in a working-class, racially mixed district of south London; the show’s title refers to the apartment building from which a Muslim girl and a policeman fall to their deaths in the first season. Collins is variously allied or at cross purposes with a cocky inspector (Emmett J. Scanlan), a nervous rookie (Tahirah Sharif) and a tough, stoic constable (Jimmy Akingbola) in stories involving agonizing questions of personal and professional conduct; all four are excellent.

‘Miss Merkel’

Angela Merkel, free of her duties as chancellor of Germany and retired to the fictional Klein Freudenstadt (Little Happy Town), stays sharp by solving the occasional local homicide in two German television movies that premiered Tuesday on MHz Choice. This Merkel, played by the veteran stage actress and director Katharina Thalbach, is a gossipy, evidence-stealing, slightly smug 70-ish pixie whose stern East German upbringing gives her the wherewithal to run rings around feckless local cops in the former West.

That attention-grabbing twist on the cozy-village mystery (the films are based on novels by David Safier) does not entirely make up for some lackluster direction and a Teutonic propensity to deliver even sharply written laugh lines with as little expression as possible. But Thalbach’s running patter of political in-jokes and jabs at Merkel’s contemporaries and successors is consistently amusing, even accounting for the number of references that are most likely opaque to American viewers. “How do you manage to exploit me for your own goals against my beliefs?” Mike (Tim Kalkhof), her young bodyguard and reluctant crime-solving partner, plaintively asks, speaking for a generation of European politicians.