RISKY SECRETS: Episode 1-5

Everyone’s got problems, but that’s especially true of the four central characters of the serialized crime drama Risky Secrets: a piano teacher with a sickly mother and financial difficulties, a gangster who’d rather be running an art gallery, an Afghan war vet with a drug habit and a shaky marriage, and a literary agent suffocated by her own sexual inhibitions. They work together to find solutions to their problems, but their efforts are undermined by various blackmailers, extortionists, and informants, and their lives become seriously imperiled by the unwanted attention of the NYPD and the Russian mafia. Suspense mixes with dark comedy and the occasional madcap moment in this TV series with a storyline and atmospherics rooted in the cinematic traditions of Alfred Hitchcock and film noir. The action takes place mostly in New York (Brighton Beach, Sutton Place, and Chinatown), with additional scenes unfolding in war torn Odesa, a Soviet labor camp in Siberia, and the ganglands of Kingston, Jamaica.