Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Infamy’ On Netflix, Where A Teen Deals With Conflict Between Her Roma Roots And Her Hip Hop Ambitions

Do you remember an FX series called The Riches? It ran in 2007-08, and starred Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver as the heads of a family of Travelers who fought against their con artist natures while assuming the identity of a family who owned an empty house in the South. It was a show that was rife with issues regarding tradition vs. modernity and family loyalty vs. forging your own path. A new series from Poland explores similar issues, but also adds in Euphoria-style teen angst into the mix.

INFAMY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A teenager shaves off her hair, while echoes of “She brought shame on us!” reverberate in her head. As tears stream down her face, we see hints that she’s wearing a wedding dress.

The Gist: Seventeen year-old Gita Burano (Zofia Jastrzebska) is living with her family in a trailer park in Wales. They’ve been there long enough where she’s built a life; she goes to school, has great friends, is dating a great guy. But as she bicycles into the park, her father Marko (Sebastian Lach) tells her it’s time to pack up.

The Burano family is going back to their native Poland to move back in with their Romani family; they’ve been exiled from the family for years due to gambling debts Marko has incurred. As Gita’s mother Viola (Magdalena Czerwinska) reminds her husband, Gita is the reason why they’ve been invited back into the fold, so even though Gita is reluctant to leave Wales and everything she knows, she needs to come with them.

At first, Gita refuses, but when Marko gives her permission to stay behind, she agrees to move back with them. When they get back to the mansion the family calls home, they’re all on the stoop to greet them; at first they look unwelcoming, but then the warmth begins to flow, especially when Gita sees her grandmother for the first time in years.

Viola wants to make sure Gita follows the strict rules that women in Romani families need to follow — no makeup, always wearing skirts, always acting in subservience to the men in the family. Of course, Gita chafes against all of them, and her first day at the mansion tries to be defiant by wearing her hair down and donning shorts. But she gets the message, at least while she’s in the house.

She then goes to the local high school and attempts to enroll, something that Romani women in the area don’t usually do. She needs her parents’ consent, which she tries to get during a dinner party that night, which welcomes a Czech businessman and his son Janko (Josef Fečo) into their home. Gita comes down in a traditional dress, and she gets along well with the Janko, until he tells her to get him some juice.

As Gita wanders the mansion, she finds a recording studio. She turns on the mixing board and computer, gets in the booth, and raps about being a “gypsy” and how it’s in conflict with being a woman in 2023. She finds herself attracted to a distant cousin, Tagar (Kamil Piotrowski), and he wanders into the studio as she’s recording; he says she’s “got good flow.”

During the dinner, when she and Marko sing together for the family, she gets the idea that she’s being married off to Janko. Marko tries to discourage the notion, but Gita is definitely part of the deal that allows the family to forgive his debts.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Infamy is Euphoria crossed with The Riches crossed with Unorthodox.

Our Take: Infamy dives into lots of issues, from family loyalty to tribal patriarchy to modern society’s conflict with a closed society’s old-fashioned rules and customs. But it puts all of those issues on the shoulders of Zofia Jastrzebska, who plays Gita. And her strong performance in the first episode shows that she can handle that weight well.

While we see how Gita’s family conducts themselves, with their garish clothes and home decor, and their way of living a lavish-to-them lifestyle with whatever money they come into, it’s Gita’s conflict that’s at the core of the series. She wants to be a rapper, not a subservient woman married off to a man she barely knows. She has no problem telling off who she needs to in order get what she wants, as we see when she goes in to apply to the local high school.

But she’s clearly conflicted. She does want to be a part of this larger family she is just rediscovering, even if she finds their traditions and view of women to be repugnant. Once she figures out that the marriage plot she surmised in episode 1 is actually real, we’re curious to see what her reaction will be. There’s a hint that she has an older sister that no longer has an association with the family, and seeing that example may temper Gita’s desire to forge her own path.

There are so many places that this story can go, which is why the first episode was so intriguing. And with such a strong performance by Jastrzebska already established, we’re looking forward to seeing how Gita navigates these conflicts in her life.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Marko, despondent over the idea that he has to sell off his daughter, stares into space on the front stoop. Gita comes out and says, “Dad, did you know they had a studio here?”

Sleeper Star: Both Josef Fečo as Janko and Kamil Piotrowski as Tagar will represent interesting sides of a love triangle Gita will have to deal with.

Most Pilot-y Line: The family is dealing in some sort of sinus medicine scam, but it’s not well-explained. We’re thinking that’s on purpose; we trust that what Gita’s family is involved in is shady at best, criminal at worst.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Infamy gets off to a good start, setting up a strong story about a modern teenager who is thrust into a family with traditions she finds repulsive, but because it’s family, she’ll have a lot of tough choices to make.

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.