As Star Trek: Discovery‘s first season finished last night in the US, I feel obligated to point out – as I haven’t already and I’ve now very nearly missed my chance – that if you’re wondering where you’ve seen ‘Ash Tyler’ (Shazad Latif) before, it’s very probably on Channel 4’s Toast of London.
For he is none other than Clem Fandango.
The French have had something of a love affair with Starsky & Hutch, ever since it first aired on TF1 between 1978 and 1984. Slightly prosaically, TF1 retitled the show Starsky and Hutch, but as well as allowing the dubbing company and voice-over actors to add a bit more humour and joshing about to the scripts, it also gave the show its own theme song.
The French version of the show remained on air for years, albeit on other channels other than TF1, so it’s no surprise that a generation later, it’s still having an effect on French programming.
Back in 2008, France’s third channel remade the show as Duval et Moretti, a not 100% serious, often direct pastiche of the original.
That only lasted a season, though, so perhaps the French were only really interested in the real deal…
Airing on France 2 since 2013, Cherif stars Abdelhafid Metalsi as the eponymous head of Lyon’s Brigade criminelle, a cop who gets results… but has some fun while doing it. The show was created Lionel Olenga, Laurent Scalese and Stéphane Drouet, but Olenga at least is a big fan of Starsky and Hutch, because he went all the way to Beverly Hills to beg a certain actor to take part in the show.
He agreed and he appeared on the show in last night’s episode Quand Cherif rencontre Huggy:
Huggy serait bien avisé de fournir ses "bons tuyaux" à #Cherif.
Ce soir, épisode spécial 🤩 pic.twitter.com/B1JuW6xoSV
— France tv (@FranceTV) January 26, 2018
Yep, Huggy Bear (Antonio Fargas) himself appeared – occasionally even speaking French. Fargas explains more (in English) here:
[via; HT Thierry Attard]
Just one new acquisition this week – The Alienist (US: TNT; UK: Netflix) – of which I’ve just reviewed the first episode. That’ll be available in its totality on Netflix here in the UK from April 19.
There’s also been a secret acquisition by Amazon of season 2 of Baron Noir (France: Canal+). Why do I say secret? Because firstly it didn’t tell anyone and secondly it’s deploying a secret new airing strategy. What is this secret new strategy? Well, you know the way it makes available the latest episode of a new US TV show the day after it airs in the US? Same thing here, even though it’s French. In fact, the first two episodes are already available.
Okay, so not that secret really.
Billed as “as an epic saga of the secret history of the 1930s American heartland, chronicling the mythic conflict and bloody struggle between big money and the downtrodden, God and greed, charlatans and prophets,” Damnation sees firebrand faux preacher Killian Scott and his smarter, more literate wife Sarah Jones stirring up a proletariat uprising against capitalism. Trouble is, professional strike-breaker Logan Marshall-Green is on his tail, and he’s willing to do what it takes to stop the revolution before it starts.
An intriguing, failed experiment and a window onto a generally unobserved time and place that still has a lot going for it in many areas. But it got cancelled this week so season 1’s your lot.
Episode reviews: 1
As I mentioned earlier this week, Germany’s long-running Tatort krimi series is actually made up of several different strands supplied by different parts of Germany. Walter Presents has already given us two of these strands as Cenk Batu (‘Team Hamburg’ from 2008 to 2012) and Nick’s Law (‘Team Hamburg’ from 2013 to 2016), but up next are The Mind of a Murderer (‘Team Dortmund’) and Inspector Falke (the new ‘Team Hamburg’).
Set in the 70s, Maltese sees police detective Kim Rossi Stuart return to Sicily for the wedding of a childhood friend and gets caught up in a murder case which sees him waging war against the mafia in a desperate effort to unravel the truth. Rike Schmid co-stars.
Set in Boring, Oregon (that’s a real place, BTW) in 1996, Everything Sucks! is a coming of age story that revolves around the High School’s A/V Club and Drama Club – two groups of nerdy-edgy outsiders, who join forces to make a movie.
After a white cop accidentally hits and critically injures a black teenager, a northeastern US city explodes with racial tensions, an attempted cover-up and its aftermath, and the trial of the century.
Stars Regina King, who seems to be the queen of anthology series these days.
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