This article is taken from the April 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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It’s a strange, almost paradoxical life, working as a journalist in a foreign country, as both Jake Adelstein and I can attest. While Adelstein was based in Tokyo in the 1990s I spent much of my journalistic career living in Budapest, covering central Europe and the Balkans.

I moved temporarily to Berlin and Paris, but that shining city on the Danube kept pulling me back. I immersed myself in Hungarian culture and politics, shopped at the same supermarkets, drank in the same bars, ate in the same restaurants as the locals.

Disputes still rumble on about the accuracy of some of Adelstein’s book

I learnt the language, married a Hungarian and we raised our children there. I became a kind of semi-native by osmosis. Sometimes people thought I actually was a Magyar (until I started speaking Hungarian). Yet however much I felt at home, however informed I was, I knew I would always be an outsider looking in.

There is no danger at all of the locals mistaking Jake Adelstein for a Japanese person in Tokyo Vice, now showing on BBC iPlayer. A Jewish-American Midwesterner, Adelstein moved to Tokyo to work as a journalist for the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, the first westerner to join the reporting staff. Adelstein covered the organised crime and Yakuza beat, at some danger to himself, and then went freelance before writing Tokyo Vice, his 2009 memoir.

“For a foreigner to learn Japanese that well, report and write articles in Japanese, work and function inside that culture was truly impressive,” Naoki Tsujii, who worked with Adelstein, told the Hollywood Reporter. Perhaps predictably, disputes still rumble on about the accuracy of some of Adelstein’s book — he claims that it is an accurate record, others demur.

But it doesn’t really matter as this enthralling series is not a dramatisation of the book, but is “inspired” by it, according to its producers.

Adelstein, marvellously played by Ansel Elgort, brings American journalistic brio to the very staid, top-down newspaper. He wants to lift up rocks and see what lies beneath, expose wrongdoing and shine a light into the dark world of the Yakuza.

Tokyo Vice is much more than a newsroom drama

Adelstein’s editors think otherwise, at least at first — and make it clear that if he doesn’t like the way the newspaper works, he is free to leave at any time. He stays, toeing the line at first, then steadily pushing the limits of what can be reported and finding allies, such as his editor Eimi, convincingly played by Rinko Kikuchi.

But Tokyo Vice is much more than a newsroom drama. It takes the viewer deep into Tokyo’s criminal underworld — the hostess bars, prostitution and the ornate hierarchy and social codes of the Yakuza that lie beneath the bright, blinking neon, and their dangerous web of connections with the police.

Just as in 1990s central Europe, many of Tokyo’s western expatriates are escaping their old lives. None more than Samantha, superbly played by Rachel Keller, who has abandoned her Mormon upbringing to work as a hostess — and then plans to break free and open her own club. I’m glad to report that Season Two is on the way.

Finally, a mixed verdict for Better, a BBC drama also available on iPlayer, which never quite realises its full potential and could be much … better. Leila Farzad plays DI Lou Slack, a corrupt West Yorkshire cop. She’s put away plenty of villains, but she’s also been working for one of the biggest local gangsters for twenty years — Col McHugh, played by Andrew Buchan.

The series opens with Slack in a pub when she takes a telephone call. She leaves and is soon stumbling around a murder scene, where the victim is gasping his last. Instead of calling for help, she picks up a gun, which she later presents to McHugh in a snazzy gift-bag. For a detective inspector she does not seem very worried about leaving DNA traces on the scene.

Like McHugh, DI Slack has a taste for the finer things in life. She lives in an enormous, stylishly decorated house with her husband, Ceri, and son, Owen, that is clearly far beyond the means of a mid-ranking copper. When Owen almost dies of meningitis, Slack, like many in a hospital waiting room facing a potential terrible loss, prays and pledges to be better. Owen lives and Slack turns to the path of righteousness. Instead of working for McHugh she will bring him down — and his evil criminal empire!

Redemption is always a powerful dramatic theme, but here it feels unconvincing

On the plus side, the tangled relationship between the cop and the mobster is well showcased. There is some smart, snappy dialogue and a nice crackle of unrealised sexual tension. Both Slack and McHugh have the means to destroy the other. The power flows back and forth between them as the storyline twists and turns.

Redemption is always a powerful dramatic theme, but here it feels unconvincing. The problem is the lack of initial dilemma. Slack was quite happy to enjoy all the many fruits of McHugh’s payoffs, and even leave someone to die. She was not blackmailed, or pressurised, or forced to work for a gangster. She enjoyed the thrill of her double life — and liked the rewards even more, so our sympathy for her sudden conversion is measured. Quite meagrely, in my case. Slack moves from black to white far too smoothly — and the ending is just silly.

Fifty shades of grey would doubtless be too many, but a few more could have lifted this series into the first division.