Morpheus

I'm not quite sure how I feel about "Morpheus". The acting is top-notch, and the sense of a seedy, foreboding European crime drama is convincing, "but" there's a problem. My sense of what's convincing and what's not ends there. After that point, the well-established premise falls off a contextual cliff when you examine what the rest of this story hinges upon. To digress for a moment, a comparable series like "Gomorrah" worked because you knew from the get-go who you were dealing with. The main characters were Italian gangsters; it was wholly plausible they would do the terrible things they did over the course of the series to rise through the ranks of the European criminal underworld. What's not plausible is a well-established Polish lawyer, on the cusp of success, who has two little children he needs to protect and a nice wife, risking it all to recover the corpse of his low-life criminal brother who was bumped off during an orgy on a yacht. Even less plausible is that, into the bargain, he ends up throwing away his hard-won career in most respects that matter to take his place. The fact the actual career criminals who know the business, so to speak, accept his leadership is a massive stretch too. Suffice to say, what were the scriptwriters thinking? I find it unbelievable, and the whole series, for me at least, falls apart because of it. In summary, let down by an outlandish backstory that simply can't be taken seriously. A shame as there's a lot else here to like.