The Sketch Artist (Portrait - Robot)

This is a very decent offering from French Canadian Television: well scripted, well directed, well acted, and contrary to the naysayers - it is believable! To address the comment that the senior police officer was too old and would be too unfit to carry out his duties: perhaps you missed the scene of his working out in their gym, monitoring his vitals and talking about how much longer the workouts needed to last?! In Canada, our officers have routine fitness training and assessments- so that critique is just ageist at best and wrong at worst!

As for Eve knowing how to retrieve "memories", might I suggest you educate yourselves: it's a well established and documented fact that the brain takes in all sorts of details, that may only be retrieved under certain circumstances and questions. Thus this "flaw" as some reviewers called it, is anything but! Just because it may challenge your current position or lack of knowledge, does not make something unbelievable!

To all those naysayers, I say NO! Educate yourself, and stop exhibiting the D-K effect in such startling force!

The show is believable, honest and very human - it portrays the good and the bad in each of us and address complex human behaviours as well as medical issues.

This is a show that is not to be missed!!

Well done Canada.

I have been a forensic specialist for 50 years. I have seen every movie x 5. Sick of searching for something new and then i stumbled on this. It's not the plots, it's the characters. I particularly like the forensic scientist. Shades of the bbc series, silent witness, and not quite so good bec it's too quick. I like silent witness for its slow pace and multi episode format. Also the relationships are given, and have been given, lots of time to develop. Apart from that, some of the plot lines in the sketch artist are intriguing - even if you've seen them x5. I will watch this to the end without feeling this it time i will never get back.

Full marks..

I checked this out on the PBS website, because it looked like a bit of a change from the copycat crime/mystery series populating PBS offerings these days.

I was right. From the very start, we learn that the four main characters are a fascinating little group of misfits, and the actors who portray them are wonderful too. Then add in the two or so other characters who are regulars on the show, and you have a full deck of entertainment.

So it's sort of immaterial what the investigations and crimes are, because the characters' personal lives are even more interesting. But the writers are good and have cooked up an imaginative slate of crime and mystery events, some of which regularly intersect with a mob boss and some which give the viewer a gasp of surprise and shock when they suddenly happen.

One other interesting thing is that the series takes place in Montreal, so the characters speak French (with easy-to-read subtitles), or rather a Franglais mix of weirdly accented Montreal French called 'Joual' mixed with English words, phrases, and sentences. It's pretty interesting in itself.

It took me a while to warm to this original crime drama series about a police sketch artist who helps to solve crimes investigated by the Montreal Police by using all her skills and emotional intelligence to create electronic 'identikit' profiles of both victims and suspects. Éve Garance (played by Rachel Graton) is surrounded by a rather oddball bunch of colleagues, but while they all contribute something interesting, her civilian background and kind of superpower of 'reading' people make Éve central to solving each crime. The final 'piece' in the 'jigsaw', if you like, and in that sense 'Portrait-Robot' AKA 'The Sketch Artist' is reminiscent of CBS's wonderful 'The Mentalist' in the noughties.

Credit to all the actors and production staff involved, particularly Sophie Lorain who plays Maryse Ferron, Éve's logic-obsessed wheelchair-bound boss and Alexis Durand-Brault who directs the action (Lorain and Durand-Braul also wrote the series), and the other co-stars Rémy Girard as the moribund veteran 'hack' detective Bernard Dupin and his rookie sidekick crime scene technician Anthony Kamal (Adrien Bélugou) add a bit of intrigue and humour to the proceedings. It wouldn't be 'noir', of course, if Éve didn't have some sort of personal issues, but the on the whole the 2-episode story arcs steer clear of the worst clichés and I felt there was enough by the end of Series 1 to want more. I watched 'Portrait-Robot' on British television as part of the 'Walter Presents ...' features of mainly foreign language crime dramas on Channel 4, but would imagine the series is widely available. Give it a go, why don't you?

Both my wife and I have watched the series. I binged it over a week and my wife is still catching up. There are some glaring holes in the storylines and also some actual facts pertaining to the characters as to their conditions that are well documented and spoken about on social media but the characters are naively unaware. That can be annoying at times but correctable in later series if the show continues. It is TV, after all, so we enjoy it for what it is. Critics who are nitpicking are just looking for recognition and can go elsewhere for their desires. Even if we do have to watch it with subtitles and annoying commercial breaks.