What I love about Netflix’s Kleo is that it’s so damned German

I was almost tempted not to watch Kleo because it sounded like so many things I’d seen before: beautiful ex-Stasi assassin, mysteriously imprisoned for nameless crimes, suddenly out of a job after the fall of the Berlin Wall, takes brutal revenge on all who betrayed her.

It’s reminiscent not just of everything from La Femme Nikita, Kick-Ass and Kill Bill to the ghastly, grisly Killing Eve, but of any number of hitmen-out-of-retirement dramas (most recently The Old Man), plus every revenge yarn from the Count of Monte Cristo onwards, all seasoned with a delicate hint of Deutschland 83.

But the thing about TV, you realise, is that originality is overrated, not to mention all but impossible. What matters is the detail, the tone, the handling. If you get those things right, and Kleo has, then your audience will forgive you any amount of cliché in the storyline.

Kleo Straub is very charmingly played by Jella Haase in such a way that no matter how many people she brutally kills – by gunshot, fugu fish poison, an explosive jacket, cake, etc. – you still think she’s a lovely, sweet girl you’d happily have as your daughter-in-law. This is certainly preferable to the lesbian, torture-porn aesthetic of the BBC’s Killing Eve, which rubs your face in the Villanelle character’s violence. Yes, there is gore, but a) the people she executes frankly have it coming to them and b) it’s all so tongue-in-cheek that it never feels too real.

This is what I like about foreign drama series, by which I mean ones made outside the Anglosphere. For example, what made the Turkish sci-fi series Hot Skull for me wasn’t so much the so-so plotline as the early Doctor Who aesthetic and all the things it taught you about the Turks, like how much they value smoking, traditional food and elderly mothers.