STATELESS
Netflix, 3:00 a.m. ET
SERIES PREMIERE: This new Netflix series, which it says was “inspired by actual events,” takes four disparate stories, following four different protagonists, and sends them on a collision course. Instead of parallel lines that never meet, they’re story threads that are destined to collide, intertwine, and eventually twist around each other like a braid. It’s set in Australia, but the politics, class differences, immigration issues and other aspects are universal. Cate Blanchett, who just triumphed on TV in Hulu’s Mrs. America, serves as executive producer and co-star of yet another made-for-TV miniseries triumph. In Stateless, she plays a woman who, along with Dominic West from The Wire and The Affair, runs a self-improvement arts troupe that is part song-and-dance class, part EST-like cult. Yvonne Strahovski, from The Handmaid’s Tale, plays one of the main characters of Stateless, playing a woman whose aimlessless leads her, eventually, to an immigration detention center, along with a refugee family from Afghanistan, a working-class father, and a mid-level politician. Strahovski, born in Australia, finally gets to use her native accent in Stateless – as does the Australian-born Blanchett. But Dominic West, born and raised in England, fakes an Australian accent perfectly, as persuasively as he adopted an American accent in The Wire.