No, not a talent show – at least not in the accepted sense – Voice 2 (Netflix) comes at the police procedural from a refreshing, if not an entirely novel, angle. Television shows long ago decreed that the people answering the telephones when an emergency call is placed, people otherwise behind the scenes, should become familiar to us. Not all, however, have a slow-witted police unit at their disposal that they can generally boss about and taunt with, “I told you so,” at the end of a case. And few have a leader who has developed something amounting to a supersense, able to winnow out criminals when all standard techniques for catching the bad guys fail. The Golden Time Team is a force within the force, a newfangled, Seoul-based department whose promise is that they will be on the scene of a crime within 10 minutes of an emergency call being received. It’s a sort of souped-up customer service division that actually answers the phone and doesn’t play hold Muzak. Led by the cold, distant Kang Kwon-joo (Lee Ha-na), who has powerful, personal demons to exorcise, the team must take on some of the most despicable, sadistic criminals ever to brandish weapons in a police series. Accordingly, the not uncommon scenes of full-blooded violence here conclusively cross Voice 2 off the family-viewing curriculum. Nor is this in any way another spin-off from some superhero universe, although a superhuman ability is the most essential pillar of the show’s premise. The details of how it was developed by the reserved, aloof Kang can be investigated fully in the original series ( Voice , also streaming now), which not only ridicules the petty politics that riddle all large organisations, but exposes the hostility Kang must repeatedly fight against – not least because she’s a tenacious woman trying to introduce new ideas to a stagnant old boys’ club. Serial killers and psycho-killers, egomaniacs and murderous manipulators all find a home in a production with sufficient cliffhangers and dramatic tension to have inspired Japanese and Thai remakes. As well as a third and a fourth season. Talent will out. In Valley of Tears, HBO takes on the 1973 Yom Kippur war The Holy Land: a bitterly ironic name for a region of the Middle East where religion and politics fester in a toxic swamp of their own design. And the setting for HBO Go’s 10-part Valley of Tears (now streaming; two new episodes every Friday), which explores the 1973 Yom Kippur war from the viewpoint of the Israel Defence Forces. Six years earlier, Israel humiliated its Arab neighbours in the Six-Day War; here we have the payback, with initial attacks timed to coincide with the most important day in the Jewish calendar and catch Israel off guard. The trauma and terror of tank battles and close-quarters bunker warfare aren’t too long in arriving. But before the bloodshed come the portraits – of the soldiers, their wives and families, a bohemian actor in search of his conscript son and the left-wing, anti-government activists (some in the army) inspired by the Black Panthers of the United States, who aren’t convinced that combat is such a great idea. Potential melodrama is avoided in favour of jarring realism, to which end the series was largely filmed in the rocky Golan Heights, where Israeli and Syrian forces faced off in 1973. Light on the Arab perspective, but presenting a more balanced look at a perpetual squabble than any warmongering, tub-thumping rallying cry that might have been expected, Valley of Tears suggests that in war, there are just as many conflicting opinions as victims – and that elected leaders can usually be trusted to disregard the most prudent.