Netflix’s 'Hostage' Situation Is Compulsively Watchable

Our streaming services are conducting a long-term love affair with a genre I’ll call Let’s Put A Female Leader Under Duress! You know the qualities I’m talking about: A competent, often powerful woman is going about her critical business, and finds herself in the middle of a major political crisis, usually driven by a threat to her family and/or nation. How will she respond? How will she marshal her energies, intelligence, and inner circle to help her navigate the crisis? Will she try to keep it all a secret, suffering under the misapprehension that it will be safer, somehow, to do so?

We’ll know that she will do so if she talks about taking transparency and honesty seriously before the eruption of the situation that will drive the rest of the series. Some people around the Female Leader Under Duress will urge her not to yield an inch to the evil-doers, while others will counsel doing as they say. Everyone will worry aloud that they’re just not sure she can withstand the pressure of being both a woman and a leader in a time of crisis.