Money heist: La Casa de Papel: Setting the bar for global television

The set-up gives the programme its distinct advantages: among the robber characters, all of whom have code names taken from cities around the world, are the punk-rock beauty Tokyo (Úrsula Corberó), who narrates; Rio (Miguel Herrán), a hacker and Tokyo’s lover; Moscow (Paco Tous), a middle-aged miner-turned-thief; and Denver (Jaime Lorente), Moscow’s son and the person who shot the beautiful hostage in the aforementioned scenario, then helped to hide her from the other thieves, dressing her wounds in the vault. (It’s complicated.) The team is overseen from the outside by a mysterious mastermind they call The Professor (Álvaro Morte). National Police Corps inspector Raquel Murillo (Itziar Ituño) is charged with negotiating an end to the heist while also dealing with an abusive ex-husband. Among the hostages are a Mint employee who is pregnant with her married supervisor’s baby and the rebellious teen daughter of the British ambassador to Spain.