Plucked from the bountiful fall harvest of international series, this selection of notable shows travels from the sheerly fanciful — Angela Merkel whiling away her retirement investigating small-town murders in “Miss Merkel” — to the achingly real, as survivors of the Oct. 7 attacks tell their stories a year later in the Israeli series “Picture This.”

“The Tower”

Gray and quiet in tone, this British cop show is a little like a more serious, less amped-up “Line of Duty” and a little like a simpler, less emotionally walloping “Unforgotten.” Situating it between two of the most absorbing British crime dramas of recent years does not do this modest series (its four-episode third season concluded last week on BritBox) any favors, but it holds its own as a character piece in genre clothing.

Gemma Whelan (the seagoing Yara Greyjoy in “Game of Thrones”) stars as Sarah Collins, a by-the-book detective sergeant in a working-class, racially mixed district of south London; the show’s title refers to the apartment building from which a Muslim girl and a policeman fall to their deaths in the first season. Collins is variously allied or at cross purposes with a cocky inspector (Emmett J. Scanlan), a nervous rookie (Tahirah Sharif) and a tough, stoic constable (Jimmy Akingbola) in stories involving agonizing questions of personal and professional conduct; all four are excellent.

“Miss Merkel”

Angela Merkel, free of her duties as chancellor of Germany and retired to the fictional Klein Freudenstadt (Little Happy Town), stays sharp by solving the occasional local homicide in two German television movies that premiered Tuesday on MHz Choice. This Merkel, played by veteran stage actress and director Katharina Thalbach, is a gossipy, evidence-stealing, slightly smug 70-ish pixie whose stern East German upbringing gives her the wherewithal to run rings around feckless local cops in the former West.

That attention-grabbing twist on the cozy-village mystery (the films are based on novels by David Safier) does not entirely make up for some lackluster direction and a Teutonic propensity to deliver even sharply written laugh lines with as little expression as possible. But Thalbach’s running patter of political in-jokes and jabs at Merkel’s contemporaries and successors is consistently amusing, even accounting for the number of references that are most likely opaque to American viewers. “How do you manage to exploit me for your own goals against my beliefs?” Mike (Tim Kalkhof), her young bodyguard and reluctant crime-solving partner, plaintively asks, speaking for a generation of European politicians.

“Citadel: Diana”

When the swank, globe-hopping spy-vs.-spy series “Citadel” premiered last year on Amazon Prime Video, it was billed as the foundation of a franchise in which future shows would be set, and made, in different countries around the world, produced by local studios. The first iteration — made by Cattleya, the company behind glossy, bloody Italian series like “Gomorrah” and “ZeroZeroZero” — is a little better than it needs to be, its style and momentum keeping your qualms about the pasted-together story at a tolerable level.

Matilda De Angelis, who had a few memorable scenes as an incipient murder victim in the Nicole Kidman-Hugh Grant melodrama “The Undoing,” is a more interesting screen presence than Priyanka Chopra Jonas was in the original. She carries the action as an operative caught between the rival spy outfits Citadel and Manticore. She stoically wields large guns as well as the kind of miniaturized, semi-fantastical communications and surveillance technology that simplifies the plotting and execution of sinister contemporary spy thrillers like this one. (Prime Video in America will probably default to the English-dubbed soundtrack; fastidious viewers can quickly change their settings to the original Italian audio with subtitles.)

“Picture This”

Israelis who were directly involved in the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks — kibbutz dwellers, concertgoers, captives taken to the Gaza Strip and later released, rescuers from the police and army — sit for half-hour interviews with journalist Ben Shani in the eerily peaceful setting of a TV soundstage. Their stories, illustrated with animated sequences by Israeli artists, are riveting, from the teenager Mia Leimberg’s 53 days in captivity with her pet dog to the grandmother Perach Pilo’s 48 hours locked inside her house’s safe room, while a dozen Hamas attackers took shelter in the home and the Israeli military sent bulldozers to knock it down.

The series, produced by the Israeli public broadcaster, Kan, is carried in the United States by the streaming service ChaiFlicks, where the fourth of eight episodes will be available Sunday. Watching from outside Israel, you might notice the universality of the public-broadcasting sensibility: the soft music, the studiously rustic set decoration, the overall sense of curation. It might also occur to you that there almost certainly will be no comparable, handsomely produced collection of stories from the other side of the Gaza border fence, which is not a criticism of “Picture This” but is certainly a shame.

“Doppelgänger: The Double”

Based on a true story about the last years of the Iron Curtain, this Polish miniseries on Max follows two men working in very different ways for the future of their country: a spy placed by the Polish government in France, and a shipyard worker in Gdansk who supports the Solidarity movement. They have never met but they are intimately, ruinously connected. In this pre-Internet time, the spy has been able to assume the identity of the shipyard worker, passing himself off as the other man even to relatives of the worker, who take him in. The man in Poland, meanwhile, wonders why his applications to travel abroad are never approved,

Jakub Gierszal stars as the young spy who begins to wonder about the man trapped in Poland for his sake, and Tomasz Schuchardt as the unsuspecting victim trying vainly to track down the family that is being hidden from him. Both give solid, human-scale performances, appropriate for a political and historical tragedy told in a melancholy minor key. The story in the four-episode “Doppelgänger,” expanded from a film by Polish director Jan Holoubek, deserves to be called Kafkaesque; it’s a conspiracy thriller in which the conspiracy, rather than being unveiled, is visible from the start and only grows more grotesque.