Engrenages

This 8 part French detective serial is going out un-publicisied on BBC3 in the UK. It has some resemblances to the very darkest American cop shows, but is really grimmer and dirtier. There are unifying themes and tangents which may work into the main plot. It's impossible to explain how different things are from a UK police drama. The legal system is very different and it's fascinating to follow - who has power to do what to whom. The Police and Prosecutors aren't exactly corrupt, but in a way they can't help being. The police look like criminals and work out of what seems like a run-down basement. A brilliantly convoluted thriller, with all the fascination of a really alien legal system, Paris backdrop, washed out colours, general decay. Final episode on BBC next week, but you should be able to see it somewhere. I see from Amazon France that there's a second season.

Engrenages is a Paris-based police procedural making no concessions to the easy-viewing requirements which deaden its English speaking equivalents. Dowdy police, incompetent lawyers, crims in grey shading into the deepest black. Acting, camera-work, lighting and print quality is imaginative and thorough. Each episode had an exemplary cliff-hanging or shock ending. The rather delayed and somewhat cryptic sub-titles make it tough for non-native speakers, but it has done wonders for my bog-French. Sheer pleasure: the news that they are shooting a new series is excellent. Lets hope it goes out again on BBC3 or 4 - much too demanding, even for BBC2.

Fast-paced, like NY in the 70's, dirty cops with hearts of gold, people you despise but grow to love, there are car chases, bombs, gangs, vice, serial killers, very little glamour, nothing fake (like US TV) - colleagues, family, friends, bereavement, retirement, freemasons, wrong steps, putting the wrong steps right. Oh la la - so much going on and it just keeps on going on, not one slow episode as far as I can remember. I just don't know what I'm going to do when it all ends in a couple of episodes. So sad to be no longer spending my evenings with Gilou, Laure and Josephine.

Series 1:

Magnifique! - gritty French police procedural buried on BBC4, each episode enmeshing you in a darker and darker world of crime, pain, and - as everywhere - a convoluted legal system that is best summed up by a brief exchange mid-series: "It's cruel." "It's only justice." With great performances and a coldly verité mise en scene, this holds its own among the best US & UK police/legal dramas. Oh, and need I say how refreshing it is to see a non-US drama on British screens? A large cast perform excellent dialogue, an engrossing single theme backed up by numerous sub plots, each one driving the characters forward as all the best drama should. The lead characters are attractive/repellent as required, but always interesting, without looking like an advert for a shampoo. In fact there's none of that slippery high-gloss (where every 'goodie' is always right, and never makes a mistake) that has marred some US series. Spiral attracted a good deal of support on BBC comment pages and is already being replayed on BBC4, with series two on the way. If it doesn't get a showing here there may be a riot.

Series 2:

Now season two is over - all too quickly - I'm left actually gasping for more. It's the kind of show that makes the rash of 'CSI' type programmes looking plastic and rather basic. Is it because I'm so cynical that this show suits my way of thinking about the world so well? That dark, messy, morally ambivalent universe they live in is recognisable even past the cultural differences, such as the astonishing blurring of the boundary between investigative police work and judgement – it's not so much uniquely French as uniquely modern. I recognise this world: you could find desperate council estates and desperate police departments just like it all over the less photogenic parts of London and the UK. And as for the relationships – they're as fleeting, unresolved and problematic as everybody's are.

I wasn't sure if they could top the tour-de-force complexity and classy storytelling of season one; and I'm not sure they did; but it doesn't matter - the quality is still so high, and the series-long story arc so engrossing, that you don't waste too much time comparing them. Some familiar faces, and some new characters, keep things ticking along nicely. My only criticism really is that the 'villains' (as if it were really possible to separate them from anybody else!) of season one were so nasty, so venal, so atrociously amoral, that it was always going to be difficult to find new villains that didn't make you wonder where the bad stuff was happening. This lot were kind of old school. The final episode did leave me slightly confused and was I think underwritten in the haste to get to the end. Isn't the crucial difficulty of policing - everywhere - precisely that no one ever does really have that last minute change of heart, so that les flics must tread their dirty path alone?

I just watched my last ever episode of Engrenages. No more, supposedly, will be made. I've seen every single one over the years and watched the characters grow and change as well as the new ones introduced.

It's showing a harsh reality of the underside of glamorous Paris. Corruption, poverty, slavery, immigrant crime, drugs, murder and robbery. Having used the word "reality", one mustn't go overboard. The series requires a hefty dose of acceptance of the absurd to be able to believe in the plot. Cops, judges and lawyers don't act like this in the real world. Some of the coincidences are contrived. However, the excellence of the acting and the overarching plot lines mean that one simply forgets about the inconsistencies and exaggerations.

Everyone has to have their favourite characters in the series and mine was Judge Roban. I missed him in the final season, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and I don't think he would have put up with some of the shenanigans that the two new judges allowed.

Of course, without the character of Laure, there would be no series at all. It's hard to imagine another actress pulling this off throughout the seasons. And the disaster zone of Gilou simultaneously ruining and solving investigations.

The series could not have been about dry police procedure only and therefore opened out onto the private lives of the characters. Usually this is done in a cosmetic way to add some purported human interest, but here the personal meshed with the professional and drove the plots along in unforeseen ways.

The producers weren't afraid to kill popular major characters off either which was a definite plus. It added a frisson and new blood to the overall story. And neither were they frightened of losing sympathetic minor ones either that other series might have shied away from. These deaths weren't wasted as they were drivers of the plot and development itself.

All in all, a super series that kept the tension up for far longer than many others could have. So many are burnt out after two or three seasons but not Engrenages. I'm perfectly devastated that it's all come to an end.