Image: Mathew Towers/Netflix
Published Nov 3, 2026, 12:45 PM EST
Denis is a news writer for Collider with close to five years of experience in the industry. He has analyzed shows across different genres, formats and styles. His favorite types of articles to write are exciting news updates and episodic deep-dives. He might say he doesn't have a favorite show, but he has watched The Wire, Shameless, The Big Bang Theory, and The Blacklist more than once. Denis is increasingly becoming focused on the global streaming arena and how media connects with audiences in various markets. Find him on X tweeting about something random that occurred to him about a TV show or the industry in general.
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One of Netflix's biggest appeals to subscribers is the variety of backgrounds its stories offer. A Netflix show can take a viewer to another country and culture, making shows feel fresh. The current top shows globally show that fans crave diverse narratives. Lupin, the French heist thriller starring Omar Sy, is the most-watched show, followed by the new Korean thriller Dead-End Job, with the Swedish drama A Couple of Lies, starring Frida Gustavsson (Vikings: Valhalla), in third place. For the next major release on the platform, viewers head to the UK for one of the streamer's most addictive spy shows.
Joe Barton — known for shows like Giri/Haji, The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself, and The Lazarus Project — created and wrote the series. It stars Ben Whishaw and Keira Knightley as two assassins caught up in the world of dangerous spy games. The series was a critical hit, earning a 92% score on Rotten Tomatoes from over 70 reviews. "Blending multiple genres into a truly unique action-thriller, Black Doves hits its target dead on," the consensus on the site reads. The show returns this week with an equally action-packed story.
Some time has passed in Black Doves Season 2, and things have gotten more complicated. Helen (played by Knightley) is still betraying her nation's secrets to the Black Doves organization, and this treason could have far-reaching consequences, with her husband Wallace (Andrew Buchan) preparing to become Prime Minister. Elsewhere, Sam (played by Whishaw) has lost everything he loves, so he is left to seek comfort in the bottle while performing menial hits. The pair is brought together when someone tries to set up Mrs Reed (Sarah Lancashire), Helen's handler, and they must unravel the mystery or risk being collateral damage. Black Doves Season 2 drops on November 5.
Collider Exclusive · Action Franchise Quiz What Action Series Would You Thrive In? Wick · Fast · Mission · Die Hard
Four franchises. Four completely different ideas of what a hero is: the assassin with a code, the family that never leaves anyone behind, the man who does his own stunts, and the guy who simply refuses to die. Only one of them runs on your particular brand of trouble. Eight questions will tell you which one you would survive.
🐕Wick
🏁Fast
🧨Mission
🎄Die Hard
FIND YOUR FRANCHISE →
01
How does a room know you've walked into it? Every action hero arrives differently. Some of them arrive before they arrive.
ASomeone recognises me, and the temperature in the room drops without a single word being said. BLoudly and warmly. I arrive with my people, and we're already laughing about something. CI'm the one who told everybody where to stand. I walked this room twice before anyone else arrived. DBy accident. I wasn't supposed to be here, and now I'm the only one who can do anything about it.
NEXT QUESTION →
02
It turns physical. What does your fighting actually look like? Choreography is character. Yours says something about you.
AEconomical and devastating. Trained technique, no wasted motion, finished before most people notice it started. BLoud, heavy and weirdly joyful. I'm not elegant, I hit like a truck, and I always have backup. CTo plan, until the plan breaks. Then I improvise at full sprint and refuse to stop moving. DBadly, honestly, and with a lot of swearing. I take more damage than I deal and I still don't go down.
NEXT QUESTION →
03
Who is standing beside you when it starts? Some franchises are built on a team. Others are built on one person walking in alone.
ANobody. I have contacts, favours and people who owe me, but when it begins I work alone. BEveryone. My people are the entire point, and I'd trade the whole mission for any one of them. CA small hand-picked team I trust completely, and I'd still take the worst part of the job myself. DA voice on the other end of a radio and a building full of people who don't know I exist.
NEXT QUESTION →
04
It has gone badly wrong. What keeps you upright? Act two exists to find out what you're actually made of.
AFocus, commitment and sheer will. Grief is fuel if you point it in the right direction. BThe people counting on me. I don't appear to have a limit when it's family on the line. CRefusing to accept the odds. Somebody has to do the impossible part, and it's going to be me. DSpite, mostly. And a growing sense that these people picked the wrong building.
NEXT QUESTION →
05
There's a vehicle. What are you driving, and how? No action franchise has ever survived without a car chase. This one is yours.
AA black muscle car I am unreasonably attached to, and I will dismantle an entire empire over it. BSomething impossibly modified, at impossible speed, off an impossible ramp. Physics is a suggestion. CA motorbike at full throttle through a city I memorised last night. And then off a cliff. DA borrowed car, badly, while somebody in the passenger seat politely asks me to slow down.
NEXT QUESTION →
06
How do you feel about the people giving the orders? There is always an institution. There is rarely a good one.
AThere are rules and I respect them absolutely, right up until somebody breaks one against me. BI don't take orders. I take care of people, and everything else tends to sort itself out. CI serve the mission, not the memo. If my people are in danger, the orders come second. DThey're in a van outside telling me what I'm doing wrong while I'm the one bleeding on broken glass.
NEXT QUESTION →
07
Underneath all of it, what are you actually doing this for? The stunts are the reason people come. This is the reason they stay.
ASomething was taken from me that can't be replaced, and I've been settling that account ever since. BBelonging. I built a family out of people who had nowhere else, and I'll defend it with everything. CThe conviction that if I stop, people die. I don't know how to hand that to anyone else. DI just wanted to get through the holidays with my family. Everything after that was self-defence.
NEXT QUESTION →
08
When the credits roll, what do people say about you? Every franchise is really an argument about what makes someone worth watching.
AThat I was a myth people warned each other about in whispers, and that they were right to. BThat I never left anyone behind, the door was always open, and there was always a place at the table. CThat I did the impossible part myself, every single time, and never asked anyone to risk it for me. DThat I was just a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time, who turned out to be very hard to kill.
REVEAL MY FRANCHISE →
Casting Has Been Completed Your Franchise Is…
Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive the trilogy, and probably headline it.
John Wick
You are precision with a grudge. You don't posture, you don't escalate, and you don't warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are so careful never to be the reason you start.
- The Wick films run on discipline: an underworld with actual etiquette, a hero who honours every rule of it, and a world that unravels the instant someone breaks one against him.
- You share that quality. You are extraordinarily reasonable right up to the line, and then completely immovable past it.
- Focus, commitment and sheer will. You'd be the one carrying grief through three sequels and turning it into technique rather than noise.
- People wouldn't call you dangerous. They'd say your name quietly and let that do the work.
Fast & Furious
You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about: the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and you'd drive through a building for any one of them.
- This series went from street racing to orbit without ever changing its actual subject, because loyalty scales and plot doesn't have to.
- You have the same instinct. You build a family out of whoever turns up, and then you defend it past the point of reason.
- You'd thrive here because the franchise rewards exactly your strengths: warmth, nerve, an absolute refusal to leave anyone behind, and a relaxed relationship with physics.
- The mission can wait. The barbecue cannot.
Mission: Impossible
You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself anyway. It looks like control, but it's really responsibility. You have never worked out how to ask somebody else to carry the risk.
- This is the franchise of the plan that collapses on schedule: the team, the mask, the rooftop, and the one person sprinting flat out because sprinting is all that's left.
- You share that refusal to accept an outcome. Told the odds, you treat them as an administrative error.
- You'd thrive here because these films reward competence and loyalty in equal measure. The mission matters, but nobody on the team gets left on the wrong side of a door.
- Some people delegate the cliff. You have never once been that person.
Die Hard
You are not the most trained person in the building, the best equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.
- Die Hard invented the modern action hero by making him mortal: outgunned, out-planned, bleeding, and extremely funny about it.
- You share that stubbornness. Adversity doesn't make you noble, it makes you sarcastic, and then it makes you unstoppable.
- You'd thrive here because these films reward improvisation and nerve over preparation, and you've never had the luxury of preparing anyway.
- You didn't want any of this. You just declined to be the person who let it happen.
↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ
Is 'Black Doves' Worth Watching?
According to critics, the first season is worth checking out. British shows have always excelled in the crime thriller genre, and Black Doves is no different, with its moral quandaries and edge-of-your-seat action. Collider's Carly Lane said the show was "worth unwrapping," calling it "a lean, character-driven treat that is full of surprises." ScreenRant's George MacArthur concurred with Lane, describing the show as "ambitious" and a "genre-blending success." However, it wasn't all praise, with Daily Mail's Christopher Stevens calling the show's dialogue "risible." Black Doves is also primed for a culture war with its female and gay leads. That might explain the lower audience score of 64% because of "woke".
Stream all episodes of Black Doves Season 2 on Thursday, November 5, and stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
Release Date December 5, 2024
Network Netflix
Directors Lisa Gunning
