8 TV series every architect or designer should watch

It evokes the contents of the film directed by Bon Joon-ho, director of the award-winning Parasite, who, in turn, reworked the graphic novel Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob and Jean-Michel Charlier. Set in a dystopian future where the world is uninhabitable due to a new ice age, the series sees humanity’s last survivors forced into a high-tech train, the Snowpiercer. In the train there is the fiercest classism. It is a reign of terror. A constant tension between the righteous and the brave who want to overthrow the dictatorship established by the evil lord and inventor of the train, Mr Wilford.

The NYC neighbourhood of the Deuce is the set for an extraordinary succession of metropolitan overviews of drugs and prostitution. Written by the genius David Simon, the film stars James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal, with some Method Man’s titbits. The rising porn industry becomes a chance for the neighbourhood lowlifes to make ends meet, economically and artistically, but the spectre of AIDS begins to take over New York nightlife. The number of people infected with HIV is constantly increasing and the spread of cocaine generates recurring waves of violence. An endless alternation of emotions between outfits and super cool locations with incredible references on today’s pandemic.

Top boy is a dark and necessary set-up of a powerful drama about “how people behave when institutions fail”, this is how the Independent describes the series. The absolute protagonist of Top Boy is the London crime, the child of suburban poverty and social exclusion. It is scripted by Ronan Bennett, a former IRA militant and now successful author. Thanks to a superfan, the rapper Drake, Netflix has brought this drama of London’s drug gangs back to life in the form of a searing indictment of our times. Many of the scenes seen in Top Boy are inspired by news stories that have the streets and courtyards of Summerhouse – a London apartment building-ghetto – as their privileged settings and a full-on trap soundtrack. In an original way, Top Boy fits into the footsteps of other TV series, of which Gomorrah is perhaps the most famous.  

It is a violated body that of Michaela Coel, extraordinary author and performer of one of the tougher series of recent years. It all begins in Ostia. A place chosen for its Pasolinian drifts, but also more recently the privileged set of Claudio Caligari’s cult film, Don’t be bad. This is where the story of the protagonist Arabella Essiedu/Coel starts, a London writer of Ghanaian origin who, in the midst of a creative crisis, goes on holiday to the Roman coast in search of inspiration. On her way back to London, during the celebrations for the delivery of a new work, something goes wrong. Arabella finds herself with foggy memories and thus begins a dramatic and gripping reconstruction of a traumatic violence. Michaela Coel experiences this process as a personal catharsis and above all as a report of pink washing.

Luca Guadagnino draws a suspended world, a generational cross-section focused on the American military base in Chioggia. The appointment of a new commander upsets the patriarchal balance that sustains every military dimension. Commander Sarah Wilson/Chloë Sevigny is a woman with a wife, Maggie/Alice Braga, and a son, Fraser/Jack Dylan Grazer. It is Fraser himself, with his adolescent anxieties, who guides us through a miniature America with all its nuances and paradoxes. The drama is the conflict that revolves around the clash between the superficial calm of the homologation of military life and the vibrant sense of diversity that simmers in individual subjectivities. In this wandering, exploring, with headphones fixed on his ears and the (extraordinary) music blaring, Fraser meets a girl of his own age, Caitlin/Jordan Kristine Seamón. A creature without a defined gender, fluid in search of her own identity, just like Fraser. This search for self becomes poetry and drama, but such is life.

Ethos investigates the Freudian concept of the uncanny, the unheimlich. The house where you do not feel at home. Istanbul, a metropolis of a thousand contradictions, is the backdrop to a story where bridges do not alleviate the inequalities between the European and semi-rural Asian shores. The unheimlich hits Anatolian veiled women, displaced Kurdish families and the westernised bourgeoisie. The protagonist is Meryem, a religious, veiled maid, afflicted by fainting spells of psychosomatic origin, who begins a tormented therapeutic relationship with a lay analyst, Peri. Thus, a sequence of relational events is born, revealing human complexities on both sides of the Bosporus, beyond the differences in lifestyles.

Created by the artist and activist Katori Hall, P-Valley is set in the fictional town of Chucalissa, located in the depressed and flood-prone Mississippi Delta. The Pynk strip club is the epicentre of a dramatic property speculation operation. Gentrification also arrives in imaginary countries.  The lives of the strippers and the extraordinary protagonist Uncle Clifford/Nicco Annan are turned upside down. The club is transformed into a political space where the bodies of women and Uncle Clifford are at the centre. Liberated, glittered and wigged bodies are framed and told from a different perspective, from the point of view of the women themselves, to the rhythm of a deep, blues-infused rap. Everything is feminine, the writing, the direction and the extraordinary choreography do not just show the characters as bodies to be desired or profited from, but as universes with their nuances and weaknesses, with a story to tell.

One of the most acclaimed series and commented by critics and audiences for its content and especially for the presence of the social and teen superstar Zendaya. It is a generational overview suspended between redemption and fall, in short, the unveiling of the fragilities of being young. Created and directed by Sam Levinson, Barry’s son, director of Good Morning, Vietnam and Rain Man, Euphoria seems to be a lysergic journey through friendships and experiences that burn with an aesthetic made of fluorescent colours, strong contrasts, neon nights and glitter. Everything is psychedelic, even the music, suspended between techno accelerations and vaporwave sounds. The two young women give life to a painful and intense succession of failures and rebirths. Losing and redoing everything. Is not this how you discover your own truth and the world?