Unfamiliar thrusts two former spies back into danger when an incident from their past comes back to haunt them. They are living with new names and new jobs and trying to be a normal family. This Netflix series from Germany is about danger, family, and secret lives.

Unfamiliar begins with Meret (Susanne Wolff) and Simon (Felix Kramer). They run a restaurant now and are celebrating the 16th birthday of their daughter Nina (Maja Bons). Simon is the chef, but he’s also a doctor. The two of them run a safe house where Simon doctors injured spies and agents who need to hide or escape but are injured.

I loved the safe house. It was crammed with secret rooms, hidden passages, cameras, steel doors that could slam down at the push of a button, disguised gun ports, a gas chamber, and the doctor’s spaces. It also had living spaces. The whole place was cool.

A Russian from their past, Koleev (Samuel Finzi), was looking for them. Sixteen (I emphasize the number 16 here) years ago in Belarus he was involved with an incident with them. He wants to make sure they were not able to cause any problems for him now because his wife Vera Koleeva (Genija Rykova) was to be appointed Ambassador.

The man Koleev sends in to figure out if the chef and his wife are actually the couple he wants is killed by them. When the BND find his body, they learn he swallowed a cardboard with Meret’s finger print on it.

The key players from the BND are Julika (Seyneb Saleh), Alice (Sina Martens), and Ben (Laurence Rupp). Julika is the smart one. She figures out a lot of what’s happening using that fingerprint. She sometimes gets it wrong. Alice and Julika used to be a couple and Alice is hoping they will be back together soon. Ben is their boss. One of these three is a mole for Koleev.

There are two more important characters. Jonas (Andreas Pietschmann) was hired by Koleev to kill the ex spies. He has a problem carrying out that mission when he sees Meret – they were former lovers. Oops, complicated. Katya (Natalia Belitski) is a woman they haven’t seen for 16 years that Meret thought was dead. Nope, she’s very alive. More complicated.

All the thriller action bits are included. The car chases, the hand to hand fighting, the guns blazing, the blood pooling – it’s all there. The series is set mostly in Berlin. There were six episodes. With the action, the flashbacks, and the scenes involving the secondary characters things moved along crisply. I appreciated the number of good women characters in the mix. If you like an action thriller, Unfamiliar should appeal to you.