‘ChiaroScuro’ Season 1 Review: Can a Forger’s Son Catch a Killer Who Paints With Blood?

Netflix has dropped ‘ChiaroScuro’ today, an eight episode Italian crime series set in Rome and produced by Lux Vide. It is directed by Jan Maria Michelini and loosely inspired by the thrillers of Mirko Zilahy. The pitch is simple enough to fit on a postcard, a brilliant art authenticator is dragged into police work when murders begin echoing famous paintings.

Our eccentric hero is Cosmo Speranza, played by Pierpaolo Spollon, a man who can tell a masterpiece from a forgery by the tiniest detail. He is also the kind of person who refuses to carry a phone, since being reachable feels to him like a leash. His reluctant partner is Angelo Tiberi, a Squadra Mobile inspector played by Andrea Lattanzi, who lives by procedure and caution.

Here is where the show gets its hook. A stolen canvas attributed to Artemisia Gentileschi turns up alongside a killing that mirrors the brutality on the painting, and then a second canvas appears at a crime scene showing Cosmo’s own childhood home. That drags him back toward his father Rufo, played by Alessandro Preziosi, a celebrated forger who died by suicide in circumstances nobody has ever fully explained.

What I admire most is how the series treats art as evidence rather than wallpaper. When Cosmo studies a painting, the canvas becomes a kind of mental stage where his hunches take shape in front of us, which lets the audience stand inside his head as the pieces click together. It is a clever visual device, and it gives the show an identity that a more generic police procedural would never earn.

The pairing at the center is the engine, and it mostly purrs. Spollon plays Cosmo with a theatrical swagger that could have curdled into mugging, yet he keeps a thread of melancholy running underneath. Lattanzi goes the opposite way with a clipped, grounded performance, and their bickering lands because neither man is reduced to a cartoon.

Rome itself is a pleasure here. This is not the glossy tourist version with every monument bathed in golden light, but a lived in city where grand history rubs shoulders with traffic jams and tired suburbs. Michelini lets locations breathe and keeps the camera curious and restless.

Now for the flaws, because there are some. The structure is a familiar one, a case of the week bolted onto a slow burning family mystery, and you can often feel the machinery turning. The supporting women, including Matilde Gioli as Cosmo’s lawyer half sister, Romana Maggiora Vergano as a medical examiner, and Aurora Giovinazzo as an art dealer, have promising setups but are given too little room early on. Be aware too that this is rated TV-MA, with murder, blood and some heavy material around loss and suicide.

So should you watch it? I think so, as long as you come for charm and atmosphere rather than a genre shake up. ‘ChiaroScuro’ does not reinvent the crime series, but its odd couple chemistry, its smart use of paintings as clues and its unglamorous Rome make it an easy and rewarding binge. I would gladly follow Cosmo and Angelo into another case, and I give the season 7.5 out of 10.

Do you think a forger’s son and a by the book detective make a winning team, or would you have preferred a darker take on the art world, and does ‘ChiaroScuro’ deserve your Wednesday night? Tell me in the comments whether you agree with my verdict.