Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Maestro In Blue’ Season 2 On Netflix, Where A Killing Is Covered Up On Paxos, While A Risky Romance Is Rekindled In Athens

The first season of Maestro In Blue was mostly about the semi-forbidden romance between an 18-year-old woman and a married musician who was brought to the island of Paxos to organize a music festival. While there were flash forwards that showed where the season was headed, the entire season was building towards the festival and the violent act that was hinted at in the flash forwards. Now that all that’s happened… now what?

MAESTRO IN BLUE SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A well-dressed pregnant woman walks down a street in Athens.

The Gist: Alexandra (Stefania Goulioti) is the pregnant woman; she’s walking to a therapist’s office, wondering just where her husband Orestis (Christoforos Papakaliatis) is. It’s supposed to be a couples’ session, and she tells the therapist that, despite everything that’s gone on in their marriage, she wants the two of them to raise their daughter together, “at least at first.”

Meanwhile, back on Paxos, Charalambos (Yannis Tsortekis) has gone missing, but there are a small number of people who know exactly what happened to him. First there’s Antonis (Orestis Chalkias), who actually shot the troublemaker, perhaps in self-defense. Antonis’ mother Sophia (Marisha Triantafyllidou) is used to hiding secrets, given what she’s had to do for her husband Fanis (Fanis Mouratidis), a businessman on the island who just got elected mayor. She found out about Charalambos being shot by her son via the town’s doctor, Michalis (Antinoos Albanis), who witnessed the shooting; the two of them have been having an affair for some time. Fanis helped get rid of the body, as did Orestis.

Even Charalambos’s son Spyros (Yorgos Benos) is involved, given his relationship with Antonis and his desire to get away from his abusive, homophobic father. He buried his father’s rifle, which is what Antonis used to kill Charalambos. When his mother Maria (Maria Kavoyianni), who still thinks her husband is missing, asks where the rifle went, Spyros just says that his dad must have taken it with him.

Another person who doesn’t know about what Antonis did is his older sister Klelia (Klelia Andriolatou). She’s still heartbroken over Orestis going back to Athens and Alexandra after the music festival that brought him to Paxos ended. Despite the massive age difference between the two and the fact that Orestis was married, Klelia really thought that he was committed to making the two of them work.

Both Klelia and Antonis are going to go to college in Athens; Klelia is going to go to the music conservatory where Orestis is a professor, so there will be some awkwardness there. But Antonis continues to be haunted by visions of Charalambos. He goes to Spyros to see if the two of them can deal with this together, but Spyros, who also sees visions of his violent father, tells Antonis that he doesn’t want anything to do with him right now.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? During the show’s first season, we said the show felt like Virgin River crossed with Sex/Life, but now it feels more like How To Get Away With Murder.

Our Take: We had to know that the first season of Maestro In Blue was going to take the twists that it did, because we saw flashes of Charalambos’ fate from the first episode. So now, what seemed to be a story about a risky romance and a village with secrets now becomes a full-blown soap opera, with the aftermath of Charalambos’ death affecting multiple families and pitting the people who know the truth against each other.

Is that really a good thing? We’re not sure. The first season was working towards the incident that led to Charalambos’ disappearance; now that it’s happened, we’re now spreading the drama among a pretty sizeable cast and two locales, with people who may or may not be able to keep what they know under wraps. Yes, that leads to some juicy drama, but it’s certainly not as focused as the first season was, and the long runtimes of some of the second season episodes indicate this.

There’s a third aspect of the season we haven’t mentioned, and that’s a just-retired police colonel going on his own to investigate Charalambos’ disappearance. Given the missing man’s “connections” in Italy and Albania, the cops on Paxos likely don’t find his case to be a high priority; they figure one of his business associates offed him. But this colonel thinks otherwise, and we bet he has his eyes on the not-so-virtuous Feris.

So, now we have a bevy of people on Paxos trying to maintain the cover-up of Antonis’ act, Antonis continuing to be haunted by the man he killed, Klelia and Orestis dealing with being around each other again in Athens, and Alexandra trying to keep Orestis in her orbit despite their broken marriage. It’s a lot. And we’re not sure that every story is going to get the attention it deserves.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be there later in the season.

Parting Shot: The former police colonel walks out of his old office with Charalambos’ case file in his briefcase.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Haris Alexiou as Sophia’s no-nonsense mother, who gives Klelia some insight into her own life, which included an unfulfilled romance with a married musician.

Most Pilot-y Line: Klelia cuts a few inches off her hair by herself, and when she walks around, it looks like she got it done at a salon.

Our Call: STREAM IT. As we said, Maestro In Blue has now become a full-blown soap, with the story about the aftermath of the death on Paxos overwhelming the romance between Klelia and Orestis, which was basically what drove the first season. It’s got a lot of juicy drama, but we’re not sure if it can sustain being so scattered in scope.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.