I’ve been a bit occupied with a broken phone today – grrr, argh – so WHYBW is going to have to wait for another time. But I’ve not forgotten you. Today – hat-tip to Thierry Attard – we have a trailer or two for season 2 of Les Témoins (Witnesses). Despite its being one of the very few French shows to make it to network TV in the UK, I missed the first season because it started airing just before my August holidays. So I can’t tell you what that was about, although the suggestions from Wikipedia are that it was quite conventional.
Witnesses is set in the small coastal town of Le Tréport in northern France, where the bodies of murder victims are being unearthed and left for discovery. The former chief-of-police, Paul Maisonneuve (Thierry Lhermitte), is implicated in the murders. Detectives Justin (Jan Hammenecker) and Sandra (Marie Dompnier) investigate the case
Sounds very vanilla.
However, season 2 looks a bit different. Marie Dompnier returns but one of my favourite actresses – Audrey Fleurot of Engrenages (Spiral) fame – is this season’s guest star and here are the trailers I promised you.
https://player.vimeo.com/video/204386413
https://player.vimeo.com/video/204386412
If your French is a bit duff, that’s “15 men found dead, frozen on a bus. All loved the same woman.” And here’s a write-up which I genuinely did translate myself this time:
A country road along the North Sea, the first day in Spring. 15 dead men, frozen, found sitting quietly in a bus.
Catherine Keemer: a mysterious woman, an amnesiac, discovered the next day in her car, 100km away. The 15 victims in the bus: all the men shared her love, for one night or a year. Sandra Winckler, a determined and obsessed cop who won’t tolerate an unsolved mystery. Sandra Winckler (Marie Dompnier) and Catherine Keemer (Audrey Fleurot): two woman who are going to need to unite for the better and against the worst.
Now that’s a bit more interesting. The show’s back on France 2 in March but no word yet if either Netflix or Channel 4/Walter Presents is going to pick it up. You’d hope, wouldn’t you?
PS No, I don’t know why the names are above the wrong people in the poster (the tag line: “Love is the biggest danger”)
Con artists aren’t very nice people. They lie, cheat and steal from people to benefit themselves, those people typically being old, trusting and/or not very rich, and who therefore typically end up penniless, destitute, futureless and/or suicidal.
What. A. Downer. Huh?
It’s no surprise, therefore, that shows that have focused on ‘flim flam’ men and women, such as Leverage or Perfect Scoundrels, have usually taken no time at all to give their anti-heroes epiphanies in which they realise that their ways are indeed wicked. Before the end of the first episode even, they’re off fleecing the deserving – aka people who are both rich and dicks.
Shows that don’t? Downers.
That’s certainly how you think Imposters is going to be during its first episode. It sees Rob Heaps playing a sensitive young Jewish man who works for his family-owned firm. He sacrificed everything for his family, including his dreams of seeing Paris, and ends up thinking his life will never amount to anything. Then along comes Belgian breath of fresh air Inbar Levi, the two fall madly in love, and before you know it, they’re married and Heaps dares to dream once more.
But before you know it (again), she’s emptied their bank account, maxed out the credit cards, taken out a second mortgage on their home and stolen cash from the firm, leaving a parting video explaining that a folder of incriminating evidence will be used to destroy his parents’ marriage if he comes looking for her.
All looks bleak and Heaps even tries to commit suicide. Then comes a knock at the door… and the show changes.
Had I not fallen a little behind with my viewing schedule, I might not have bothered watching episode two of Imposters, that first ep is so fundamentally miserable. But since I hadn’t watched episode one by the time episode two aired, I ended up watching both en masse. Surprisingly, this is actually probably the best thing you can do, since episode one is less the foundation to the show than its prologue; it’s only in episode two that you find out what it’s really doing.
It would have helped if the show had stuck to its original title of My So-Called Wife, because oddly enough, Imposters is a buddy-buddy comedy. At Heaps’ door is another of Levi’s victims – Parker Young (Suburgatory, Enlisted), a knuckle-headed former quaterback and alpha male car salesman. Together, he and the equally penniless and heart-broken Heaps are going to go on a road trip together to find Levi and get their money back. Along the way, they’re going to learn the ways of the con artist, be spectacularly bad at them, develop their own code of honour, help each other to get over their former wife, and get on each other’s nerves. A lot.
Meanwhile, Levi has moved onto the next job allocated by mysterious boss ‘the Doctor’ to her and the rest of her team, who include Katherine LaNasa (Deception, Satisfaction) and Brian Benben (Dream On). With their help, she has to woo a seemingly dickish, cuckolded darts-playing bank CEO (Battlestar Galactica‘s Aaron Douglas. Yes, it’s filmed in Canada – how did you know?), who turns out to be surprisingly sweet. But she’s distracted by the possibility of true love with coffee-shop chance encounter Stephen Bishop (Being Mary Jane). Is it time to get out of ‘the life’ or will the Doctor punish her and Bishop if she tries?
All this is good frothy fun that manages to find both a little depth and a lot more jokes amidst everyone’s misery. Levi, who did little as a button-downed Israeli commando on The Last Ship, here demonstrates a really surprising range and is hugely appealing, even when she tricks and misleads everyone she meets. Young and Heaps’ routine is both funny and suitably dorky, and their slow crossing over to the dark side is entertaining to watch as they foul up time and again but slowly get better. Their ‘code’ also shows how morality can blur when you need it to, as they initially write off children and old people as potential marks, settle on ‘assholes’ as their preferred targets, then decide that ‘asshole>old people’ in their moral hierarchy when spying a particularly dickish senior with an attractively bulging wallet.
Later episodes are set to add Uma Thurman to the mix, as well as another former spouse of Levi’s – a wife this time (Marianne Rendón) – which is bound to change the dynamic of the show once again. Despite its subject matter, while black, Imposters is certainly still a comedy and well worth a try. But you’ll need to commit.
You always have to give a show that’s had a revamp a little time to settle in. A little.
When Powerless was commissioned, it was a slightly different show from the one we have now. Set in the world of DC Comics, it featured a slightly dodgy insurance agency run by a supervillain that was trying to make money off the poor folks trampled by superheroes in their fight to stop the bad guys.
But twixt pilot and series, there was a bit of retooling. By the first aired episode, cynical old Vanessa Hudgens had turned into a dewy-eyed optimist wanting to make a difference in a branch of Wayne Industries run by Batman’s incompetent narcissist cousin (Alan Tudyk). Trouble is she has a bunch of people rejected by Better Off Ted working for her, including Danny Pudi and Ron Funches, all of whom can do little more than copy Lexcorp’s inventions. Can Hudgens turn the division round, save everyone from getting fired, help the little people and meet lots of her superhero idols, all without a single superpower to her?
Watching the first episode, the answer seemed to be “Who cares?”, “Why aren’t there any proper superheroes in this?” and “When do the jokes start?”
The second episode actually proved worse, since the first episode raised the occasional titter, whereas the second was practically soporific, beyond a nice joke about training videos being like The Shining.
Still, there’s a reason that I do these as third-episode verdicts, not second-episode verdicts. You have to give things time. And while episode three wasn’t exactly an exercise in hilarity, it was at least a reverse of the previous episode’s trajectory and I was able to watch the whole thing with a slight grin on my face, at least. The show featured a superhero I’d actually heard of, although it was The Olympian, so I wouldn’t describe that as a mainstream pick by the writers. There were a few in-jokes for comic book fans, with Gail Simone and Marv Wolfman getting name-checked. There was also a halfway decent attempt to tie the show a bit more into mainstream community by making Funches Atlantean (“Atlantis: home of Aquaman and character actor William H Macey”), allowing copious references to Aquaman. Corbin Bernsen’s arrival as Tudyk’s dad seemed to make everyone up their game. And the opening dialogue among the characters about racism (“I thought you said you were from Atlanta” “No, that’s Donald Glover, but it might be racist that you heard that”) almost made me laugh.
Almost. Because we’re still not exactly in Silicon Valley or Man Seeking Woman territory here. But the show is at least finding its feet now. I doubt, given that we’ll be at episode four next week, that the show will ever drag itself out of its z-list superhero obsession or become even laugh-out-loud funny. Not giving Danny Pudi any decent lines is a Category A disaster. But you can at least watch it and not feel like Superman near Lex Luthor’s kryptonite ring any more, which is a definite improvement.
Every Friday, I let you know the latest announcements about when new, imported TV shows will finally be arriving on UK screens – assuming anyone’s bought anything, of course.
A few new shows have been given their starting dates this week, although most of them are Netflix originals or haven’t started airing yet, so I haven’t seen them. Oh well, at least you’ll know when they start.
