What’s on TV Monday: ‘Freud’ and ‘Crumb’

Sigmund Freud is a crime fighter in the new series on Netflix. And a documentary about Robert Crumb by Terry Zwigoff arrives on the Criterion Channel. FREUD Stream on Netflix. There is plenty of dramatic material to be found in the life story of Sigmund Freud.

He successfully pioneered the theory and practice of psychoanalysis despite widespread resistance from his colleagues in the medical community and pervasive anti-Semitic prejudice. He escaped the Nazis after Austria was annexed by Germany. And he battled cancer for the last decades of his life. But in this new German-language series from Marvin Kren, fiction supplements fact: The young Freud, played by Robert Finster, is an ambitious doctor drawn into a murder investigation alongside a psychic (Ella Rumpf) and a police inspector (Georg Friedrich).

CRUMB (1995) Stream on the Criterion Channel. Before directing films like “Ghost World” (2001) and “Bad Santa” (2003), Terry Zwigoff made two documentaries. The first, “Louie Bluie” (1985), was about Howard (Louie Bluie) Armstrong, a country blues musician, visual artist and gifted storyteller. Zwigoff continued his investigation of eccentric American creators with this portrait of the underground cartoonist Robert Crumb.

The documentary surveys Crumb’s career and highlights his most notable creations, including the comic “Keep on Truckin’” and the character Fritz the Cat. But it also includes material about his wife, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, herself an important cartoonist, and his troubled brothers Maxon and Charles. All three, plus Crumb’s two children, contributed to the life and work of one of the country’s greatest and most debated pop artists. MISS FISHER AND THE CRYPT OF TEARS Stream on Acorn TV.

This feature film is an offshoot of the Australian TV series based on Kerry Greenwood’s novels about a female private detective working after World War I. Essie Davis (“The Babadook,” “Game of Thrones”) returns as Phryne Fisher in the first new installment since 2015, when the third and final season aired in Australia. Fisher travels to British-controlled territory in the Middle East to solve a mystery that revolves around “priceless emeralds” and “ancient curses. ” Along the way she saves a young Bedouin girl (Izabella Yena), whose tribe’s history might be connected with the hexed gems.