Do you know who Adeel Akhtar is? Probably not. He’s a British actor, born in London to parents of South Asian heritage. I like him because he is about my height, he graduated from law school, but he decided to become an actor. He has won a number of awards, according to Professor Wiki, and I have seen him now in at least three TV series, two quite recently. He has a very winning way about him, I think, and a unique way of speaking that sets him off from other cast members, and makes him memorable. He never quite seems like the right actor for the role when you first see him, but he grows on you very quickly.

I first saw him in a Harlan Coben series, Fool Me Once, where he played a police detective who never quite fit in at the station, who certainly had his own relationship problems, who had a major health scare in the middle of a pursuit, but – if my weak memory serves – was a hero in catching the guy he figured out to be the one who needed to be caught. I saw that series a few years ago, and liked it.

Recently, I have seen two other series in which Akhtar was in the cast. Because this is not a quiz, I will tell you what they were. First was Killing Eve, where he played a psychiatrist (or maybe a psychologist), who worked for some government spy agency (maybe MI6), but treated both friend and foe. The other one was Black Doves, where he got an unlikely promotion and became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

I don’t know if you have seen either of those series. I thought that, for the most part, Killing Eve was a treat. When I say “for the most part”, I mean the following: for the first three seasons, Killing Eve was very clever, quite confusing, 50% realistic and 50% absurd. It fell apart in its fourth and final season and became 85% absurd and 15% (if that) realistic. And, yes, those percentages have a scientific basis, I am sure. As one critic said of the fourth season: it shows you can indeed get too much of a good thing.

You know the premise? Eve (Sandra Oh) works for the equivalent of the British Secret Service (the organization that provides protection to government employees and VIP visitors to the UK). She is a bit of a hapless individual, I would say. She is married to a teacher and lives an ordinary life, although her job is a bit out of the ordinary. She fails to protect an important witness which results in several deaths, and is fired. But then she is hired by a very unusual stiff-lipped British woman, Carolyn, (Fiona Shaw) who works for MI6 and runs an operation off-the-books, so to speak, to catch an assassin, who has been murdering people around the world.

The assassin is quickly identified as a mysterious woman who goes by the name of Villanelle (Jodie Comer), a cold blooded young woman (the actress is only 31) who can murder anyone without any emotional effect, and who is impossible to catch, although she does nothing to hide. She seems to be Russian-born, and she has a handler, Konstantin, played by Kim Bodnia, of whom I had never heard, but who deserves an Emmy or an Oscar or whatever for his acting.

It turns out that Villanelle and Eve develop a very firm and unshakeable love/hate relationship with each other, as they chase each other around the world. And it turns out, of course, that no one is who they seem, that the world is not what you think it is and is not what any of the characters think it is, and you don’t find out who is who until the very end of the program, where everything is tied together. Or not.

Trigger warning: a lot of people get killed in ultra-violent manner. If you don’t like to see that, don’t watch it. But it’s all in good fun. And very unusual. And you have to like the characters.

Black Doves, starring Keira Knightly, is another story. It only has 6 episodes (as opposed to 32, I think, for Eve), but has been renewed for a second year. It has a lot of similarities to Killing Eve, but there are a lot of differences. The similarities: both are British, both involve British security services, both involve mysterious international criminal outfits, both involve mysterious off-the-books operations that you can never quite define.

In Black Doves, Keira is Helen, the wife of the British Minister of Defence and mother of four year old twins, who is also Daisy (maybe), a “Black Dove”, an assassin and spy recruited by an organization that is out to stop criminal activity, sort of, but more importantly to obtain information that can be sold to the highest bidder. She was Daisy before she was Helen and, in fact, were she not a Black Dove, she never would have married her husband, whom she doesn’t dislike, but clearly is not in love with. She has another lover, but he is killed, and he wasn’t who she thought he was, of course. But she is trapped because of the twins, who were certainly unplanned.

So Helen leads this double life and, like Eve, cannot be caught, although she does everything out in the open. Her wife-role is very public, but she leaves the kids with the nanny to go out and murder people in her other role, and she has tea with assassins and old friends in the open and the press ignores her, and no one ever sees her.

As in Killing Eve, there is a lot of brutal murdering, no one is who they seem to be, all events are improbable, and until the end, you have no idea what is going on. In Eve, you understand that you aren’t expected to know what is going on and that the whole thing is some sort of big joke. In Black Doves, the lightness is repressed (although I think it is still somewhat of a comedy) and you feel you should understand what is going on and you have no clue, whatsoever. In fact, we had a hard time remembering anything that happened in the previous episode when we tuned into a subsequent episode.

In episode six, you are hand-walked through everything you missed and at the end, you know everything, and it all makes sense. Not that it could have happened, but at least the story makes sense. In Eve, even after you are told the full story at the end of the fourth year, you still have questions – nothing at all makes sense, and the whole thing is, as I said, a joke.

At any rate….does anything I said make sense? Let me end with a very short summary. Watch Killing Eve, unless you don’t want to. Do not watch Black Doves, unless you really want to.

Now, you understand.