First off, were all these people writing such glowing reviews of this mess watching some other show by the same name, or what? I have watched a lot of crime drama from all around the world, and this calamity has none of the qualities I have ever found enjoyable or compelling in the genre, none at all.
Usually, the mob-side version of the form shows us a group of people bound by loyalty, occasionally interrupted by violence and urgent necessity as they are driven into them by the harsh realities of an underworld life. I would even venture to say that the main element holding most such drama together is how the theme of interpersonal loyalty under continual challenge is used as a kind of symbol for the larger human experience. But here, the question of loyalties, you may as well know, is answered early on and all through the nine-and-a-quarter episodes I managed to endure, is answered simply: there is none, and none to be expected to emerge. And, as shown here, continual betrayal is frankly kind of boring.
All because of "Sandra", who I have to say is the least-convincing mob boss I have ever seen portrayed, not only as a character but by the ashen-faced drabness of the lady playing her. Sandra has a lethal combination of the worst possible traits for someone in her position: she is naive, weak, irresolute, impulsive, uninformed, a victim of her own chronic wishful thinking and worst of all, arrogant. All she brings to this organization she inherits in the first entry is chaos, betrayal and death. Everything she tries, fails. She falls into every trap set for her, as she is so busy setting them for herself and her loved ones that she usually is the last to hear about the other disasters she is directly responsible for.
I stuck with this even as long as I did, just assuming that this impossibly slow and increasingly convoluted story line just had to be headed for some kind of turnaround, that Sandra would at long last pull her head out and rise to the occasion of a position she had never asked for much less ever been prepared to assume. But when, early in S2, she is made to stand on a table and sing to humiliate her in front of her entire organization, and complies meekly, I began to realize that apparently this is about a loser who knows nothing but how to keep on losing. No, thanks.
The ONLY redeeming quality this has is the Corsican locations. Period. And even that is ruined by a pretentious cinematic style which has the camera shaking around all over the place and keeps reverting to these weird badly-framed closeups where half of someone's face is in one corner of the screen while the remainder of the frame is just blurred and meaningless.
I never was much of a fan of French cinema anyway, and its television crime dramas have been consistently the least watchable owing to their being the most self-important and unconvincing of them all.
I don't know what the Frogs' fascination is with female leads who are comically inept at their jobs while their personal lives are nothing but one long juvenile scandal of poor communication and untrustworthiness, but I find it repulsive, as I did this. Only the Swedish make worse crime dramas with more intolerable female lead characters, but add some snow and this would be every bit that bad.
