It seems to me that, in the library of Netflix original series, there is a glut of both sci-fi options and mystery/detective-type shows. We’ve tried our fair share of the sci-fi ones and not really found any that impressed us enough/didn’t disgust us with unexpected graphic sexual material. But we hadn’t really tried many of the mystery options, I think mostly because a lot of them just sound pretty much the same as one another and rather bland.

But recently I looked a little more closely at those mystery options and discovered that one called “Paranoid” sounded fairly promising. We gave it a try.

Premise

It’s actually British, and it felt rather “Broadchurch”-ish, which I consider a good thing.

The show follows a group of three British detectives in a small town who are investigating a brutal murder of a female doctor. The mystery involves framing and a deep conspiracy that the detectives end up tracing all the way to Germany.

I feel like the premise itself is solid, but what makes it better than an average detective show is that these three main characters are multi-faceted and have a lot of other issues going on in their lives. There’s a woman who wants to have a baby but is having love-life issues, a guy whose mother is freaking crazy, and a guy struggling with anxiety issues kind of late in life just as he meets a woman he might fall for.

And, to make everything more difficult (and engrossing) these detectives’ boss doesn’t buy the conspiracy they think they’ve uncovered and instead wants them all to drop what appears to be a closed case.

One interesting issue…

I’ve always been a little bit intrigued by some certain issues related to the medicineal industry, which this show happens to explore a little bit.

You know how if you look into any kind of vaccine controversy, you end up with a million pieces of contradictory information, including some from people who seem to think that all drug companies are out to get us and make money at the expense of people’s lives? I’ve always found it hard to distinguish between empty conspiracy theories and legitimate concerns, when it comes to things like medications, and I’ve hated how bringing up concerns with doctors often seems to make a person sound totally paranoid. Well, let’s just say that the name of this show has a double meaning, and I found the implications to be rather interesting.

Moral Issues

The show is rated TV-14, so there’s nothing outrageously terrible in it, but still a few things that could be of concern:

Discussion of a woman’s past issues with being sexually loose. There’s a very brief, not very graphic description of things she did, and pornographic photos of her are shown very briefly.

A couple has premarital sex, but nothing very graphic is shown.

Some violence – we see the doctor get murdered by stabbing on a children’s playground in the first episode and it’s a bit grisly, but that’s definitely the worst of it.

There’s a bit of language, but it’s not an excessive issue. There’s also a couple of brief non-graphic sexual jokes, and a male character’s homosexual relationships are very briefly discussed.

So there are a few things, but definitely nothing that was so frequent as to make us feel that it took over the show, by any means.

Over All

It was really a pretty solid show. I don’t think it necessarily engrossed us quite as much as “Broadchurch” did, but it was still pretty good. Definitely a sound choice if you want a tense, thriller-type show that has more substance than a standard network procedural like “CSI” or its many copycats. And certainly a better option than the last few random Netflix original series we’ve tried.