What’s on TV Friday: ‘The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki’ and ‘Norskov’

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Sports, drugs, religion and romance: In this goody bag, two popular Nordic exports collide with finely acted love stories starring Alan Rickman and Melanie Lynskey.

What’s Streaming

THE HAPPIEST DAY IN THE LIFE OF OLLI MAKI (2016) on Mubi. Olli (Jarkko Lahti), a Finnish boxer about to go up against Davey Moore (John Bosco Jr.), the American featherweight world champion, struggles to make weight while mooning over his love, Raija (Oona Airola), in this largely true story set in 1962. “It’s a bit of a narrative slow-boil — the story arrives in pieces, in disconnected scenes and conversational fragments — but it grabs you right from the start,” Manohla Dargis wrote in The New York Times about Juho Kuosmanen’s drama, noting the “dense, luxuriant black-and-white cinematography” that feels “paradoxically fresh, not nostalgic.” Mr. Moore died the next year after a brutal fight, immortalized by Bob Dylan in the ballad “Who Killed Davey Moore?,” Ms. Dargis added. “I don’t know if a Finnish balladeer ever sang of Mr. Maki, but this film serves as a charming testament to him and to the grace of an ordinary life.”

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NORSKOV on Walter Presents. After a teenager overdoses on cocaine, the police investigator Tom Noack (Thomas Levin) returns home to an industrial city in northern Denmark to help his brother-in-law, the mayor (Claus Riis Ostergaard), clean things up. But when Tom stumbles upon a smuggling operation, secrets surface from those closest to him — not least, his childhood sweetheart and her son, a star hockey player. This streaming hit won for best series at the 2017 Copenhagen TV Festival.

PURE on Hulu. A Mennonite pastor (Ryan Robbins) determined to sever his community’s smuggling alliance with Mexican cocaine cartels is forced into complicity with a mob leader (Peter Outerbridge) to save his family. Rosie Perez plays the Drug Enforcement Administration agent in hot pursuit in this Canadian series loosely spun from real-life events.

THE SONG OF LUNCH on BritBox. In this bittersweet dramatization of Christopher Reid’s poem, Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman prickle and swoon as former lovers — he is a copy editor and failed poet in London; she was his muse, now married to a successful novelist and living in Paris — meeting for lunch at their favorite trattoria. The menu features sex, temptation, guilt, revenge and not a little Chianti.

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HELLO I MUST BE GOING (2012) on Fandor. A divorced 30-something (Melanie Lynskey) finds a haven from her adult problems in the suburban Connecticut home of her critical mother and indulgent father. She also discovers sex and romance with the 19-year-old stepson (Christopher Abbott) of a potential client her father is desperate to impress — and who has allowed his doting mother to believe he is gay. Todd Louiso’s gentle comedy “is better than the story it has to tell,” A. O. Scott wrote in The Times, “and that is thanks to the bravery and sensitivity of Ms. Lynskey’s performance and the sweet, intense love affair that is the film’s main concern.”

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