Marseille

The script is born to mimic other political scripts. And be fateful to the nanny state state school indoctrination. Nothing original. Or creative. Stock characters in a stock story. The acting is so and so. The dialogue is crap. So it's hard to blame the actors. And the writers and producers are so in need of information! It is the French white middle class view on both the very low and the very high placed people in their society. A fairy tale about life in the ghetto or the political games. Probably a series about catholic syndicate men (not women), say the railway or the teachers, extorting more money from the rest of the society would have turned out far more engaging.

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Just finished (binge)watching Marseille. It's an old fashioned but well made series with a simple straight forward storyline without any sidelines. There are some sex scenes but nothing explicit and they all serve the story (read one review that stated the series was oozing sex but that is nonsense). It's mostly about betrayal and changing loyalties in a small group of people centred around a mayor election in Marseille. The plot is very predictable and does not have surprises, you can see developments coming long before they happen. For a 8 part series the cast is very limited but good, acting is OK but in several parts I was not impressed. It's a Netflix series that will not win any prizes, they made better. Marseille is an interesting town, full of contradictions and a boiling pot full of crime and problems on one hand and promise onthe other side. Have the feeling there was more to be made out of this.

After House of Cards I hoped to enjoy a similar show in European setting this time. Depardieu with all the cast perform very well, but the script in general is rather flat. The behavior of major protagonists is illogical at times as if Netflix was very much in a hurry to release season one in 2016.

It would have been a very decent season if the script writers had studied better the psychological side of main protagonists.

Wrapping up: music is great, photo shooting pleasant to watch, location also fantastic, nonetheless it is far from West Wing or House of Cards milieu.

As an American of European descent I loved these series. All lead actors put out great performances. Depardieu didn't disappoint. May be french audience is giving it poor ratings, but as someone who doesn't speak or understands French, I loved it. I always watch foreign movies, including this one, in original language with English subtitles. I also loved Borgen, the Danish political drama series. Well done, both Marseille and Borgen.

This was supposed to be a French version of something like House of Cards. It is about the rivalry between two candidates for the political leadership in Marseille. Both Gérard Depardieu and Benoit Magimel are two good, and very different, actors for the main characters. This creates an interesting dynamic between the two.

Still, the drama feels quite flat and stereotype in its execution. Actors are overplaying at the expense of nuances, subtleties and leaving basically nothing left to the imagination of the viewer. The storyline feels very linear and predictable, there are too few twists that keeps the interest up. Also it seems like very boring politically correct approach where the good folks always are on the left side and the bad ones always on the right side of politics.

The series could have been so much more than it was. A pity with so strong casting.

No surprise that it was cancelled after two seasons.