nothingisforbidden

As of 2024, the show streaming in the Walter Presents showcase at PBS Passport in the US, titled "Circles of Powers", is in fact Season Two (without Season One) of the French series titled "Jeux d'influence", which already has its own page here at IMDb with full cast and crew credits and pages for each show of Season One and Season Two.

Reviewers here who could make no sense of "Circles of Power" have a legitimate complaint, since this series begins with Season Two of "Jeux d'influence"--Season OPne opened the story with the same characters and plotline, so "Circles of Power" starts in the middle of the story with no explanation of who's who what is motivating them and the plot.

Are the programmers at Walter Presents/PBS totally inept? Why is there no Season 1 of this show streaming in the US, so viewers can see the first part of the story? What a crazy snafu! And a black eye for PBS Passport.

I've watched every one of the long-running "Murder in..." French TV anthology series, as it is titled and streamed at MHz in the US. Despite the variety of casts and filmmakers, there's been a consistent quality, ranging from pretty good to pretty darn good.

Then...there is this stinking pile of manure. It's as if the writers have never seen a murder mystery, or written a script, for that matter. The story and characters are beyond stupid. A simple example: a woman tells a priest that her bedroom must have a demon in it, because it's full of flies. He goes to check it out, and voila, finds a big pile of rotting meat under the bed. Like...the lady would not have smelled that? Every other element and plot twist is equally lame and ridiculous.

And the lead characters, two detectives, manage to come off as both boring and rather despicable. But they are nice to look at, I will admit.

This should have been a three-hour epic brimming with fascinating scenes, amazing moments, and incredible characters. Such was the life of the Chevalier, with so much to offer the storyteller. Instead it's a plodding 2-hour melodrama with predictable, throwaway storylines, mediocre acting, weak writing, and clueless direction. The filmmakers at least do not go down the road of so much historical drama of this moment, adding rock music, gratuitous profanity, current slang, color-blind casting, etc., and instead try to do it the old-fashioned way, with that posh, Masterpiece Theater "tone," but no one involved is up for the challenge. Even the scene where the Chevalier ventures among his fellow Black in Paris and joins in the drum-playing, which should have been a raucous delight, is dull and lifeless. A missed opportunity, big-time.