Les Dames

I am amazed that only recently did I discover Les Dames (translated as Dead Beautiful for the American audience), even though its last episode aired seven years ago! This show is a hidden gem that ran for six years from 2010 to 2015. It has apparently slipped through the cracks, because it should have the same kind of cult following as Spiral (the Paris police procedural that launched the career of actor Thierry Godard). I found Les Dames on the PBS Masterpiece platform in America.

Les Dames is smart, serious, sometimes sexy, and never talks down to the audience with its mature themes. The ensemble cast in which women predominate, is fabulous, with consistently good acting.

Les Dames operates on two levels: First, there are the homicide cases, typically odd, eccentric, but ultimately plausible. On the second level, there is police inspector Martin and his very complicated relationships with the women in his life, many of whom he has slept with, all of whom he is very attached to. Thierry Goddard, who lacked top billing in Spiral, pulls off his lead role in Les Dames perfectly. The series is a kind of melange of Helen Mirren's Prime Suspect, and Truffaut's The Man Who Loved Women. I highly recommend it!

Two or three of the episodes are top notch. Others are good enough. But mixed into this erratic fare are some that are disappointing. I imagine that if you are more forgiving of the central character's inability to decline sex with anything in a skirt, no matter what trouble it will get him into, let alone the hurt inflicted on others, you might be a little less frustrated with some of the story lines.

A french detective series called "Dead Beautiful" on Walter presents. I call it "Les Fous." So far in episode 1 and 2 the murderer has acted beyond bizarrely and escalated said behavior as the story went on. Despite leaving gargantuan clues behind them the cops seem flat footed. The murderer gets more and more rash and the cops are always 2 steps behind. They do come up with the motive early on, and the motive is as crazy as the killers. It does have Thierry Goddard from "Engrenages" and "A French Village" and the love life is casually french with at least three of the women pregnant by episode 2.

Well, it's French, so keep your hand on the FF button. En France, they like the females pretty and willing, but Martin, our Chief Investigator learns that it's not so easy to juggle 3 girlfriends, and then try to 'settle down' with one. This is the backdrop to the bizarre cases he has to solve. In the second episode, we are confronted with a vicious cold-blooded female killer who is working from a list of people she needs to eliminate. She is also pretty, wealthy, married to a diplomat, and has powerful friends-this makes her a difficult target, even when Martin & Co. Figure her out. Real twist ending!

Episode 3 was stunning. Several blond females are abducted & disappear over a period of time, but the most recent is drugged, questioned & left alive by the culprit. Some similar cases are catalogued and the hunt for the guilty party begins. One of the surviving husbands begins an affair with Martin's pretty blond assistant. Soon, a bizarre link unfolds that requires many trips and re-interviewing of relatives & colleagues. You won't guess this one, I assure you. Very unique sequences tie this one together. Reminds me, in style, of the Brit series AMNESIA, which found a terrific way to pull the rug from under you.

In Euro series, we don't get the bland characters & cardboard endings of U. S. mystery entries. Time is spent developing these very human characters, but not at the expense of suspending plot progression. I thought I knew all the tricks of these Euro scripts, but this one has me reeling.

This French crime drama features nine self-contained stories. In each Police Commissioner Martin, a Parisian detective, and his team investigate various murders. Unusually for such a series in most episodes the identity of the killer is not hidden from the viewer. The stories are nicely varied with some fairly original murders; in one a killer targets women with a crossbow and in another the killer shoots seven people on a bus with a silenced weapon before getting off unnoticed.

Thierry Godard, best known in the UK as 'Spiral's' Gilou, does a fine job as Martin and he is ably supported by a fairly small cast of regular characters as well as those who only appear in single episodes. One might think that having the viewer know the killer's identity would be a problem but frequently it serves to raise the tension as we can see what they are doing to make things difficult for the police. The cases are interesting and feature some surprises and away from the cases Martin has a somewhat complicated love life. The only real disappointment was the sudden feel to the ending of the final episode; it felt as though more episodes were planned but not made.

These comments are based on watching the series in French with English subtitles.