They did not live in castles or picturesque garrets but in mini-gulags, subdivided apartments, which deprived the generations of families and strangers forced to cohabitate of any sense of privacy.
Nor for that matter is it Prime Suspect, or The Killing, or The Fall, or any of the other female detective-led series that have inevitably found themselves dusted down by critics and compared, awkwardly, with this oddity, like strangers forced together at a dinner party because the host heard they occasionally wear skirts.
The actors at times earnest, at times sarcastic capture the tension of a group of strangers forced into isolation.
Little metal tubes full of strangers, forced to sit together in close quarters for hours upon hours eating, drinking, working, relaxing, sleeping, grooming - all while flying through the sky at 500 miles per hour, by the way.
Why, it's a little stranger, forced by circumstance into a ménage that is hardly child-friendly.
My mother drove her to the hospital, and when they returned she employed my sister as Exhibit A, pointing as if this were not her daughter but some ugly stranger forced to share our quarters.
The allegorical story of how a mysterious stranger forces a cowed community to stand up and fight never once falls into didacticism, despite the fact that Eastwood's character is called Preacher – that's the opposite of what he does.
A mysterious stranger forces cowardly citizens of Lago to prepare a garish welcome for three escaped convicts.
It is such an environment that allows a Trump campaign worker in San Diego, California, offer strangers $40 to force Muslims wear "terrorist badges," similar to what the Nazis did to the Jews.
On commuter trains, where random strangers are forced to tolerate one another in close quarters for long stretches, cellphone jabberers are a particularly obnoxious life-form.
