Over the past few years, a new trend has started to emerge in television drama: the overseas cop show. Now, in a sense this is nothing new: The Persuaders! and other shows all filmed in exotic locales in the 70s and even earlier shows such as The Man From Interpol had been set overseas, even if they’d never actually gone there for filming.
But the new trend, seen in the likes of Wallander, Zen and Falcón, has English-speaking actors playing other nationalities in overseas locations. Wallander had Ken Branagh, Tom Hiddleston and sundry other Brits being quintessentially British while pretending to be Swedish, while Rufus Sewell got to drink lots of espressos in Italy in Zen, and Marton Csokas and Hayley Hatwell were as English-sounding as can be while solving crimes and romancing each other in Barcelona in Falcón.
France’s TF1, meanwhile, is looking to be a bit of an international player at the moment and, taking this trend on board, has gone one step further: rather than wait for some foreign broadcaster to start shooting a French cop show with English-speaking actors, it’s decided to do it itself and get a whole bunch of international actors over to Paris, get them all to fake American accents (except for the Americans, obviously) in a ‘quintessentially French’ cop show, and then sell the results to the rest of the world through the Fox International channel. It also managed to recruit famous French film star Jean Reno (The Professional/Leon) in his first lead TV role as the eponymous Jo of the series’ title – a cop in the famous Brigade Criminelle (what Spiral calls ‘the crime squad’) with more than a few issues. On top of that, they got in as show runner René Balcer, the creator of TF1’s late 90s cop show Mission Protection Rapprochée and Paris enquêtes criminelles, the French version of Law & Order: Criminal Intent.
Unfortunately, they also got French production company Atlantique Productions to make it. To be fair, Atlantique has been around for 30 years, making English-language productions such as Deadly Nightmares (aka The Hitchhiker), Death in Paradise and Counterstrike, not to mention Borgia for Canal+ and Transporter: The TV Series. What TF1 failed to notice was that largely, these programmes are all rubbish.
Here’s a trailer for Jo. We can talk more after the break – spoilers ahoy!
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