Watch out, spoilers!
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Watched the first season of the Italian detective-comedy-melodramatic series “Viola as the Sea” (I watched under the title “Viola, purple as the sea”) / Viola come il mare (2022 – ), directed by Francesco Vicario, who shot many series. The series can hardly be called a pure detective, although the main characters are a police officer and a crime reporter, crimes occur, they seem to even be investigated, but most of the plot focuses on the melodramatic component, including both love (almost) relationships and various family problems. A young, beautiful woman, former Miss Italy, Viola Vitale (Francesca Cillemi) comes to Palermo from Paris, where she has lived and worked for the past few years, for a deeply personal reason. It turns out that she is sick with some kind of neuro-degenerative disease, for the treatment of which it is necessary to find out whether someone from her close relatives was sick with them. She knows about her mother, who has already passed away, but she never knew her father, the only thing she has left is an old photograph in which he is visible only from the back, and the knowledge that he lived in Palermo, where he and his mother met. That’s why she comes to Palermo and gets a job at the local editorial office of some Internet site as a crime reporter. There she meets the headmistress with an extremely nasty and unfriendly character (which is later explained by her personal love problems), but she still gives a job. In the process, she meets local police inspector Francesco Demir (Jan Yaman), with whom she also begins to live next door, they even share a terrace. Francesco has a rather complex character and a rather active sexual lifestyle. But little by little, they still begin some interaction, but she avoids rapprochement with him. Her disease is accompanied by such a phenomenon as synesthesia, which allegedly helps her to determine what feelings a person is experiencing at the moment, and she sees them as if in different color halos (I do not know how much this is actually the case and whether this happens, I read that synesthesia happens all sorts of different). And then the action unfolds as much as 12 episodes with all sorts of vicissitudes and incidents, not only with the main characters, but also with other characters, in the end they decided to cast a fog at all, so fans of the series will wait for the second season, although it seems to me personally that they showed it just for the seed (I will save the intrigue, I will not name what they showed).
Well, what can I say about this series, it is difficult to call it outstanding, entertaining - you can, and perhaps more for a female audience, although I met very positive reviews from men, and on IMDb there are so many enthusiastic reviews of viewers. This is not the first time I notice such a phenomenon - the famous Turkish actor Jan Yaman has been invited to the place of the main charismatic character (the first time I saw this in the series Lea - New Day, where Mehmet Gunsur played), I see it for the first time, since I did not watch any Turkish TV series, and he voices himself, since he once lived and studied in Italy. Francesca Killemi, who starred in the lead female role, is suitable for her. Unfortunately, the script cannot be called well-written, there are some sags and inconsistencies in it, but we will not be very demanding, the viewer will not pay attention to this.