Commissaire Magellan

I am a fan of several different crime genres. This series is particularly entertaining because it takes you back and forth between the crime and the mystery and the ins and outs of Commissaire Magellan's family life. It is a wonderful balance between mystery and light humor. Nothing is over done or overly dramatic. This is a show you can watch with your family/teens/younger teens. There are gruesome or bloody moments, but always post-mortem and very temporary. The storyline is the focus, not the ability to shock an audience, which I find to be over the top, over done and erroneous. The characters are all likeable and believable. It is a nice break from the average crime/mystery show. The comedic relief is appreciated.

The series has been enjoyable. However, I have been fast forwarding the scenes with the nephew Ludo. Most reviews on this character have not been positive. So why do the producers or whoever are the decision makers insist on including this character? It is a shame. The interludes with the original cast was entertaining. Is it is grinding at best. Who can we appeal to for a change and have Ludo move to Antarctica and live there happily ever after. And we can move on enjoying Saignac with Magellan and Selma. That will be appreciated by many of us.

Commissaire Magellan is an enigma: he is kind of annoyingly sympathetic but also an utter bore and very conservative living in a French small town. Still this show survived for quite a few seasons - I guess the reason is that it avoids senseless violence and action action action scenes - which I too appreciate.

Cinematography is similar, nothing stands out, which again is good, on the other hand it's also really boring again, so it fits the show. The first few episodes have terrible lighting and a brownish tint to it - so it looks even more dated.

Acting generally is ok, nothing special again.

The stories themselves tend to be rather convoluted though. Episodes are around 90 minutes long! They should be 60 minutes though. I've got the feeling there are too many pages added just to lengthen the script.

Music: it drags along in the background not drawing much attention, except in the episode 7 ('Undercover Miss' in the US), an episode called 'La miss aux deux visages' in original where the musics composer borrows very liberally from Antonio Jobim's 'How insensitive'! Or was it a love letter to Jobim?

All in all: very pétit bourgeois !

I love this 6,great scenery, mostly fantastic actors. Magellan is a cross between Vera and columbo. At least two murders per episode, although one only had one murder. What was stupid to me was the changing of the daughter's. Yes one was old enough to leave, but then they bring in a much younger girl than the youngest. She's always in adult conversations, she has a smart mouth and does she, attend school regularly??? Simon's friend Paul was ok in the beginning, then he wore his welcome out. But I would rather have him, than the bum nephew ludo. He's very unlikable, he's lazy and dirty looking. I hope there are more seasons of this series, just get rid of ludo and the entitled daughter.

If you're a fan of Midsomer Murders, but also like your mysteries to have a decidedly Gallic twist, then Magellan is absolutely for you. The plots are convoluted, the suspects are plentiful, and the dogged Inspector is invariably going to get his man (or woman). But, what sets Magellan apart from what the French would call its British homologue is its edginess, its willingness to discover dark little corners in the psyches of even its most sympathetic characters, even Inspector Magellan himself. There's a focus on the actual crime investigation itself that sometimes gets blurred in Midsomer Murders; unlike its British cousin, Magellan's narratives are sharper, more detailed, and easier to take seriously. None of the casualness that sometimes makes Midsomer Murders seem like an excuse to meander through the sometimes incomprehensible (to a foreigner) personality quirks of the British provincial elite. There's real police business being done here, and Simon Magellan, despite his Colomboesque sartorial disarray and his exasperation with his often uncomfortable role as a 21st century divorced father desperately trying to do the right thing by his precocious teenaged daughters, really is a highly respected and insightful cop. His characteristically French aura of ironic detachment barely conceals a good and decent man who clearly understands what makes people tick and uses that understanding to tease out ingenious solutions to the tangled mysteries he encounters (references to Simenon's Maigret would be appropriate at this point). Yes, the mythical Northern town of Saignac appears to account for just about all of the murders recorded in France in any given month, but that's what we love about formulaic, locked room mysteries like this -- they tell us that the world may seem perennially out of joint, but that with local heroes like Tom Barnaby in England and Simon Magellan in France, everything will turn out more or less alright.