IT’S Emmy Award season but rather than dwell on television’s past it might be better to dwell on its future.

What follows are the best (and worst) of autumn series previewed at the recently concluded Series Mania, the Festival of Global Television in the French north-west former mining centre of Lille, where many of the series were concerned with either highlighting or concealing and smoothing over class differences in the wake of the vast transfer of wealth that has followed the Covid billionaire accumulation in the online goldrush.
 
The location was relevant because the best of these series was a new French public television version of Germinal. Two episodes of the six were broadcast at sites throughout this region which, when Zola wrote the novel in the 1880s about a coalminers’ action in 1860, was still the coalmining and industrial centre of the world.

The novel is a long debate about the need for, the effectiveness of, and the tactical ways of managing a strike as a way of workers clawing back some measure of decency from a life which requires ever more sacrifices just to make one’s daily bread.

Reimagining Germinal as television serial restores the novel to its original serialised version in the literary periodical Gil Blas between November 1884 and February 1885.

There is a nice blend of personal and collective in the endings of the first two episodes which need to propel the audience forward.

Episode one ends with what is depicted as the rape of the mining girl Catherine by a rough fellow miner Chaval, while episode two ends with Catherine’s mother Maheude, after her young son is crippled for life in a mining accident, casting a full-throated vote for a strike.

There is a nod to contemporary financial structure as the mine manager Hennebeau positioned at a long table on the other end of which sit the Parisian company stockholders, argues for the miners but is told by the board members that “this is a war” and they cannot relent.

The series is shot in cinemascope but rather than giving the work a sense of grandeur, the effect, because of the grisly palette with the director citing as influences Peaky Blinders and the darkly ominous films of James Gray (Little Odessa, The Yards), is one of gloomy misery, visually echoing Zola’s description of the mine as “a mechanical monster and the men and women mere beasts or insects fed to the monster.”

The companion piece to Germinal in terms of its high degree of class consciousness is the Australian series The Unusual Suspects about two high-end families and their Filipina maids in Sydney’s lavish, gated, eastern suburbs.

The Unusual Suspects has the matrons of the two households, betrayed by either criminal or incompetent husbands, aligning with their maids to pull a heist to try to maintain their status.

The series is also about the way that the dominance of financial capital and the symbolic economy is turning people into various kinds of scam artists, where nothing and no value is real.

Sara’s (Miranda Otto from Lord of the Rings) “company” which she is trying to sell to a US investor is all about family management but she doesn’t know where her own kids are.

Roxanne, a Filipina herself, who runs a high-end women’s health spa, described as a kind of scam where intuitive care is packaged as abundant scarcity, wrecks her maid Ana’s pension by allowing her husband to invest it in his Ponzi scheme, resulting in a bonding food fight between the two since they are both now victims of the scheme.

Gigi, a young Filipina, refuses to do the work of a maid and instead insinuates her way into Sydney society as a “coach” and self-help guru.

The series highlights the way value is divorced from production and created and lost on the whim of its “influencers,” hedge fund investors and vulture capitalists.

The worst or most disappointing series tended to be those which simply focused on unbridled and unquestioned class privilege.

The sometimes reliable French actress Julie Delpy, star and then co-creator of Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight film series, is one of the creators and the star of On The Verge, a series about four forty- and fifty-something women in LA who help each other through the apparently difficult time of what in male series is called midlife crisis.

Unlike the far better Almodovar film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, where the heroines struggle against a vicious patriarchy, when these upper-middle-class career women are on the verge of not a nervous breakdown but rather a mild anxiety attack, they go to the beach or more likely go shopping on Rodeo Drive.

What they really are on the verge of is becoming “Karens,” the eponymous privileged racist figures that keep popping up in the media.

Their supposed “struggle” for recognition as they age is in a way no more compelling than similar series about privileged men superseded by youth and now mostly relevant because of their wealth; let’s call them Dicks, a prominent example of which was TNT’s Men of a Certain Age.

On the horizon in the new television season is hopefully more grappling with the wealth disparity, which at its most absurd point features in the US a recent report by the Treasury that the rich have cheated the government out of $630 billion in unpaid taxes while Congress argues over whether the poor and working people “deserve” to have daycare education and free community college.

Let’s hope this season features more cross-class alliances, fewer “Karens,” and no more “Dicks.”