Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Ultraviolet’ On Netflix, A Polish Procedural Where A Woman Solves Crimes With Lots Of Internet Help

If you thought the only countries that produced procedural dramas were in North America, then Ultraviolet will be a pleasant surprise. The Netflix series is from Poland, where a woman uses the assistance from a group of internet sleuths to help her solve crimes. Sounds a bit familiar, right? Read on to find out why it’s better than a similar American procedural that failed miserably last year. 

ULTRAVIOLET: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A woman staring into space in a convenience store is told that other customers are waiting. She leaves, sticks her tongue out to the clerk through the window, takes a pill, then checks the rideshare app she drives for: she’s got a fare waiting. She gets in her bright red car and drives off… and the coffee she put on the roof falls to the ground. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” she exclaims.

The Gist: As Ola Serafin (Marta Nieradkiewicz) drives an overprivileged college student around the streets of the Polish city of Łódź, the student peruses Ola’s social media. We find out a lot about her; she just moved back to the city, her hometown, from London, where she was married. We also get the idea that Ola is just doing the driving to pick up some cash, and she did something else for a living.

After she drops the college student off, Ola sees a body drop from an overpass and hit a car below, which speeds off. The police don’t believe that the woman who fell was pushed or thrown off; they think she jumped, and they think Ola’s description is crazy, especially because she admitted she took a Xanax-like pill before the incident.

She knows what she saw, but both the detective on the scene, Michal Holender (Sebastian Fabijanski) and his boss, Inspector Waldemar Kraszewski (Bartlomiej Topa) want to close the case. Ola doesn’t trust Kraszewski, because he immediately closed the case of her brother’s murder, saying his wife shot him in self-defense, when she knows that was not what happened.

So she Googles how to solve crimes without police help, and finds the website for Ultraviolet, a network of people who solve cases the police have closed. The person who started it, an airport security officer named Tomek Malak (Michal Zurawski) grew his network from the desire to solve the murder of a body he found in a lake. His network includes women who create makeup tips videos, screen jockeys who talk on Skype with virtual masks shielding their identity, and more. All of them bring different skills, including figuring out the victim and suspects’ movements via social media.

Our Take: Remember Wisdom of the Crowd, that awful, short-lived CBS procedural from last year? Ultraviolet is what that should would have been if it had been done correctly. In the first episode, Ola and her surrogate father Henryk Bak (Marek Kalita), an automobile forensics expert, do the bulk of the shoe-on-the ground detective work, and Det. Holdender joins them on this first case when he realizes she’s onto something (they find the hood of the car the woman fell on, and Henryk notices two dents, which would never have been made by someone who jumped).

The show has a good sense of humor, and its main character is just an everyday woman who wants justice when the cops won’t cooperate, not an obnoxious rich guy who thinks he can do better. Nieradkiewicz has a flair for the role, where solving crimes seems to energize Ola, while Jeremy Piven played his role in Wisdom as if it was a grim slog. But the main difference is that the Ultraviolet users are completely in the background, fishing out evidence from photos, tendencies in social media posts, what online friends of the victim were doing. There were no massive warehouses of “experts” reporting to Ola or mobs surrounding people that may or may not be suspects.

Of course, it’s a procedural, so it has the usual leaps of faith that help conclude a case in the allotted 44 minutes, like evidence in obvious spots, assumptions that the cops aren’t doing the same social media spelunking Ultraviolet is, and evidence gathering that would likely get thrown out of courts in just about any country. Even in Poland, that structure won’t change. But the spark in Ola’s eye, her relationship with Holender and Henryk, as well as her brother’s unsolved case, make for a show that you don’t mind watching, even if it’s a bit formulaic.

Sex and Skin: Nothing.

Parting Shot: After the “Lady On The Overpass” case is solved, Holender hopes that this is the end of Ola’s career as a detective. “I can’t promise you that. I kind of like it now,” she says. When he says that one person can’t do the job of the whole police force, she says shes not alone, right as a UV alert comes up on her phone. Mayk says, “Friends?” Let the adventures begin!

Sleeper Star: Kalita is fun as Mayk, a guy who’s obviously no spring chicken breaking into cars and getting over on much younger men to get to the bottom of a case.

Most Pilot-y Line: When Ola and Mayk meet with Holender to show him the hood evidence, he’s impatient. “There are two corpses and a rape on my agenda,” he tells them. Well excuse us, Mr. Busy Cop!

Our Call: Stream it, mainly because Nieradkiewicz is a very appealing lead.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Watch Ultraviolet on Netflix