Stream It Or Skip It?

Have you watched the first episode of a series, and have gotten so confused that you decided not to bother with the rest of it? You make an evaluation if the confusion is an anomaly or not and if the characters and story are worth sticking with. That’s the thought process we went through while watching the first episode of a Romanian thriller on Netflix (and also the point of our Stream It or Skip It column). Bet you can guess where this review is gonna lean…

SUBTERAN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: In a dark alleyway, a woman breathes heavily in panic while sitting in a car. The man in the driver’s seat tells her not to answer the phone, saying people need to think she’s dead for two more days and to trust him. He then sets another car on fire.

The Gist: “36 Hours Earlier.” Police detective Luca Voinea (Conrad Mericoffer) gets a call from an informant named Marius, whose nickname is Bones (Cezar Grumazecu). He tells Luca that the accountant for the criminal family led by Nicolae Tanase (Florin Piersic Jr.) wants to give him all of the information he has on the family’s operations. Luca is reluctant, but agrees to the meeting.

Tanase, who owns a wedding venue as a cover business, finds out from Dracu Negrescu (Cosmin Teodor Pana), his right-hand man, that €2 million in Bitcoin has been drained from their crypto accounts, and is being held by the accountant in a digital wallet only he can access. Tanase feels a good person to get to the accountant is his daughter Tili (Irina Artenii), who we see is ruthless and does a lot of her father’s dirty work. Tili’s twin, Crisi (Artenii), wants the job, but Tanase doesn’t think she can handle it.

Luca is pretty close to popping the question to his girlfriend, Cami Serbu (Ana Ularu), an IT consultant, and has gotten close to her son Matei (Vladimir Andriescu). He steps out to go meet the accountant in his hotel room. The accountant, who ordered an escort, tells Bones that he wants to have fun before disappearing; Bones bugs the room so he can listen in.

When Luca gets to the room, the accountant shows him a 30-year-old Compaq laptop that he’s modified to accept modern attachments like a USB flash drive. The laptop has all the information about the Tanase family, including the digital wallet, which can’t be accessed without the flash drive attached. Luca FaceTimes Cami to get some expert advice on the laptop. While doing that, a woman in a blond wig and a snake tattoo on her chest comes in and shoots both Luca and the accountant to death. She takes a laptop, but not the antique one with the Bitcoin info on it.

After she finds out, a distraught Cami, who unknowingly receives the flash drive from the police as Luca’s next of kin, goes to Luca’s apartment to pick up some things, and encounters Bones, who volunteered to search the place as a way to protect himself. He has Crisi in tow, because she threatened to out Dracu’s relationship with her sister if he didn’t let her tag along. After telling the pair that she saw who killed her boyfriend via the video call, all hell breaks loose, leading to Cami and Bones being in that dark alley, with him telling her that people need to think she’s dead.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Subteran is reminiscent of a show like Narcos.

Our Take: Created by Steve Bailie, Subteran is a slick and well-paced thriller that seems to have a bit of a character problem. It’s one of the few shows where a better-chosen en media res opening would have given what went on in the first episode a lot better context and contrast.

Instead of opening the first episode with Marius/Bones telling Cami that she needs to make sure people believe she’s dead, we should have seen why: Bones is going to help Cami infiltrate Tanasi’s organization, mainly as a way to protect her son after she killed Crisi while trying to protect herself. We would have wanted to see Cami transformed into her Tanasi organization persona, then see her as the glasses-wearing IT consultant and mom who was in a relationship with Luca. But we just write reviews, so what do we know?

What vexed us even more was the Tili/Crisi thing. We don’t think the first episode spent enough time differentiating between the twins enough for us to clock who actually killed Luca and the accountant. So when Cami had Bones show her what was on Crisi’s chest, the fact that she had the same snake tattoo the killer did confused us. Was she actually the killer, taking matters into her own hands? Or does she and her sister have the same tattoo in the same spot? We can understand if the show’s writers wanted to keep things murky, but we got a feeling that the confusion we felt in the first episode wasn’t what they had in mind.

The series still has time to straighten out that confusion and settle into being a serviceable, albeit generic, crime thriller. But it’s not a good sign that the storytelling in the first episode feels so perfunctory that it doesn’t give enough character details to help viewers keep track of who’s who.

Sex and Skin: Tili tries to go down on Dracu, but he has to tell her that Crisi knows about them.

Parting Shot: We’re back in the alley, with Bones and Cami driving away as the other car burns.

Sleeper Star: We really couldn’t find any in a sea of generic characters.

Most Pilot-y Line: As an example of how good Cami is at her IT business, we see her telling someone at a client’s office that one person is downloading the entire series of Game Of Thrones in 4K and another is watching porn. People still do this on office networks in 2025?

Our Call: SKIP IT. Subteran is too generic to be as confusing as the first episode is. In fact, things are so muddled in that first episode we don’t hold out much hope that the rest of the season will get any better.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.