Even though Cas, who only Miep knows is gay, isn’t her biological brother, she still opts to try to get work at Opekta, the Amsterdam outpost of a German spice company. Her adoptive family is worried about her lack of direction and they have two solutions: Get a job or marry her brother, Cas (Laurie Kynaston).

When we meet the Austrian-born Miep, she’s in what seems to be a precarious position (much more precarious positions will come). Monday, May 1 (National Geographic)Ĭast: Bel Powley, Liev Schreiber, Joe Cole, Amira Casar, Billie Boullet, Ashley BrookeĪ Small Light, created by Tony Phelan and Joan Rater, recounts the attempted hiding of Anne Frank, her family and several others, from the other side of the Annex, putting the focus mostly on Powley’s Miep Gies. It’s a great performance anchoring a series that makes some missteps, but mostly does a delicate thing in an honorable and also engaging way.Īirdate: 9 p.m. She brings more humor and hopeful energy than you might expect based on the topic, and underlines every emotionally crushing twist and turn you’d expect from a series adjacent to one of the most beloved and devastating stories ever told. Playing an ostensibly ordinary woman who responds to an extraordinary challenge by finding the hero within, Powley sets the tone, or rather a variety of tones, for A Small Light. Powley is an interesting and effective choice, then, to play the lead in A Small Light, an eight-part NatGeo limited series that’s all about hiding and subterfuge. When they’re miserable, it bursts through the screen. Their characters are still capable of lying, but neither performer can lie to the camera. Bel Powley is an actor without subterfuge, which I mean only as a high compliment.

Off Limits by Joan M. Marter