Set in Trani on the Adriatic Sea in southern Italy, Gerri follows Detective Gregorio “Gerri” Esposito (Giulio Beranek, Christian), a gifted but abrasive detective whose outsider status shapes both his methods and his relationships. Transferred to a provincial police headquarters in Puglia, Gerri stands apart from his colleagues: intellectually sharp, emotionally guarded and driven by a restless need to uncover truth, even at personal cost. Striking up a partnership with newcomer Lea Cohen (Valentina Romani, La Porta Rossa), Gerri balances his police work with a personal investigation into his own childhood…

The setting is crucial. Far from the postcard Italy of tourist brochures, the series lingers in dusty town squares, windswept coastlines and tight-knit communities where everyone knows each other’s history. Crimes ripple through families and neighborhoods, exposing old loyalties and buried resentments. The contrast between the region’s luminous beauty and the moral shadows Gerri investigates gives the drama its distinctive tone.

The TV adaptation draws on the crime novels by Giorgia Lepore, whose books introduced readers to Gerri as a complex, introspective protagonist. In the novels, Lepore blends meticulous investigative detail with social observation, exploring themes of identity, belonging and prejudice. Gerri himself is marked by questions about his origins and a lifelong sense of displacement, elements that the series translates into a quietly simmering character study. Ultimately, Gerri is less about ingenious plot twists than about a man navigating fractured communities while confronting his own inner fractures, making the landscape of southern Italy as psychologically charged as any crime scene.

Screenwriters Donatella Diamanti and Sofia Assirelli, who adapted the novels for TV, describe their main character as such:

“30 years old, with deep, melancholic eyes and silences that are inhospitable to anyone, Gerri Esposito constantly has the air of someone who’s fallen into the wrong story – and perhaps that’s exactly right. We, however, are honored to have entered his story, to have interpreted Giorgia Lepore’s novels and transformed them into a TV series. A Roma for the first years of his life, then a boy raised in a foster home and today a respected police inspector, Gerri is an atypical man and policeman whose contradictions we particularly enjoy. He embodies the desires of a child who never truly grew up and the authoritarian father he never had; his every gesture is the battlefield of opposing forces: a chaotic, libertarian instinct and an iron discipline, both professionally and emotionally.”