You’d have to pay me an awful lot more than I get for this column to review Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. As I write, it’s the number one trending show on Netflix, but the most I’m prepared to stomach is that snatch of footage you get forced to watch (because of Netflix’s impertinent and intrusive automatic play function) if you linger over the title image for too long. It shows two cops at an interview desk gradually revealing to Dahmer’s increasingly aghast dad (Richard Jenkins) that his son Jeffrey might not be quite the straight upstanding citizen he imagined.

Dahmer murdered – and often dismembered and sometimes ate – at least 17 people on his killing spree between the 1970s and the 1990s. How much more do we really need to know about him than that? How can this sick freak possibly be worth ten episodes of anyone’s time? It would be excruciating enough as a feature-length movie, watching that agonisingly protracted period between the various young men being lured to their deaths and the eventual capture of the killer. But ten whole hours? Really?

You’re much better off with Munich Games, an Israeli-German co-production part-commemorating the 50th anniversary of the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics by the terrorist group Black September. It was written by Michal Aviram, one of the team that brought you Fauda, so you know you’re in safe hands.

It’s set against the backdrop of a memorial football match between an Israeli and a German team. A Munich-based Mossad operative – a dishevelled, crisp-guzzling techie called Oren (Yousef ‘Joe’ Sweid) –has found in an Arab chatroom a worrying, home-made shoot-’em-up video in which the player enters the football stadium and kills the Israeli team. What alerts him to its seriousness is that somehow the video-maker knows the exact location of supposedly secret equipment installed to ward off drone attacks. (Let’s not spoil it by asking awkward questions such as: why would he give the game away like this?)

As with Slow Horses – probably the best TV series of the past 12 months – part of the fun is watching a team of amiable, maverick intelligence misfits stumbling their way to eventual success (at least, I presume so: I’m only on episode one) via a series of cock-ups and setbacks. Another is the chalk-and-cheese contrast between the ruthless, driven Israelis and the correct, bureaucratic Germans who want to do everything by the book.

Straddling these two teams – and also, in a series of raunchy sex scenes, her handsome Middle Eastern lover – is Arabic-speaking German officer Maria Köhler (Seyneb Saleh). Ludicrously hot, brave and omnicompetent, Köhler is both a terrible cliché and probably an exercise in wish fulfilment on the part of screenwriter Aviram. But that doesn’t stop you rooting for her all the way, for what’s not to like about Ripley from Alien, Lara Croft and Charlotte Ritter from Babylon Berlin rolled into one?

After much grumbling from the German bureaucracy, Oren is eventually allowed to join Köhler’s police department on secondment. He mooches geekily in front of his laptop searching for more clues. Impatient with the methodical Teutonic way of doing things, he gets one of his Israeli spy mates to hack into the German intelligence files (this bit is quite realistic, I’m guessing) and unearths the list of current suspects on the local terror watch list.

Sharp-eyed viewers (that’s me!) will notice a massive plot revelation as he scrolls through the faces. One of them looks suspiciously like that handsome Arab chap that Köhler is currently bonking. (We learn elsewhere that he has been working for Köhler as an informer, spying on the activities of Muslim immigrants in a Munich refugee camp). Quickly, though – otherwise the whole series would be over in one episode – Oren scrolls on to an apparently more likely suspect.

This suspect is a part-time drug dealer. So gung-ho Oren fixes it up for Köhler to visit him and, while pretending to score some Tramadol, to case his squalid flat in a Gomorrah-style apartment block. Much against her better judgment she does so. But it all goes horribly wrong when Oren, waiting down below, gets accosted by some local Muslim toughs who grab his mobile phone, see that his texts are in Hebrew (are Mossad operatives really so slack?) and beat him to within an inch of his life.

There’s a developing subplot involving the Israeli football team manager who appears to be being blackmailed and who, at the end of episode one, has mysteriously disappeared. In other words, though the outcome is surely predictable – anti-terror team foils evil plot – there are going to be more than enough twists and turns, and character-driven entertainment, for you never to feel as though you are wasting hours of your life on a giant, trust-the-authorities, terrorism-is-everywhere-and-is-about-to-get-you propaganda cliché. I’m hooked, at any rate.