Drops of God is one of those gems of purest ray serene that cable TV prefers to keep hidden in its deep unfathomed caves because it thinks you want something more lowbrow. Try finding it by accident: you won’t. When I looked for it on Apple – which doesn’t have all that many shows – I had laboriously to type in its name. It wasn’t offered to me in the recommendations. If I hadn’t been tipped off by my friends Candy and Diarmuid, I would never have seen it.
I had been lamenting, as I often do, the dearth of stuff to watch on TV that doesn’t put you through the emotional wringer. When I settle down for an evening on the sofa after a hard day’s not working, I want to be taken to a happy place rather than be overstimulated by some torture-porn atrocity about a small-town detective investigating grisly murders by an occult-inspired serial killer. Nor do I want sex; nor, particularly, yet more dystopian sci-fi; nor something self-consciously wry and quirky about a psychoanalyst featuring a rehabilitated Hollywood megastar. I want something more European in sensibility: oblique, meditative, art-house, intelligent, gentle. Drops of God does the job just perfectly.
The premise is enticing. A French connoisseur of fine wines has just died and, being a tricksy, demanding, obsessive fellow he has left the potential heirs to his stupendous fortune – a magnificent Toyko apartment and the world’s best private cellar, worth gazillions – a challenge. They must blind taste and correctly identify a series of his most treasured and obscure vintages.
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