European TV

In France: Last Summertime
In the UK: Saturday 2nd April, 9pm, BBC4. Available on the iPlayer

Bonjour, tout le monde! Welcome aboard previous Engrenages (Spiral) lovers and hello to all those of you with a The Killing-shaped hole in their Saturday night TV schedules and thought you’d give a French TV series a try.

Yes, after months of our collective breath holding, Spiral is back with typical high-powered BBC4 advertising – a brief trailer after last week’s The Killing – ready to make us all go “WTF? No, seriously, WTF? That’s seriously how France runs its justice system?” again at Canal+’s answer to The Wire. All our old favourites are back: Laure, the captain of police, consummate cock-up artist and lover of brutality; Pierre, the handsome ambitious prosecutor; Roban, the ambiguously sexual, fair but draconian judge; Gilou, the over-emotional prosie-loving detective; ‘Tin Tin’, the cipher; the wonderfully evil, foul-mouthed red-headed lawyer Karlsson; and that weird chief lawyer who looks like a lizard. He’s odd-looking. It’s the eyes, isn’t it?

To accompany us on our ride into darkness, we also have the usual gruesome scenes, blanket misogyny, prissy subtitles, police corruption and rule-breaking, and eye-opening sub-plots that we’ve come to expect from Spiral – as well as a new singular image to illuminate and potentially define a whole season. In season one, it was women suffocated by transparent plastic; in season two, it was Aziz setting fire to people in cars in the banlieues; in season three, it’s a handwritten sign: “Fermé pour pédophilie.”

Here’s a slightly low quality trailer in French for the first two episodes:

Continue reading “Review: Engrenages (Spiral) 3×1-3×2”