Maigret
I can't be the only one who really didn't expect much from this new adaptation of Maigret. I mean, just looking to the English luminaries who've played the role previously, Rowan Atkinson, Michael Gambon, Richard Harris, and Charles Laughton, actors who had made a name for themselves long before Benjamin Wainwright was even born, and you realize Benjamin Wainwright didn't stand a chance. But even with this chasm of acting cred I didn't expect the show to be this bad. It even failed to meet my lowered expectations. To call it mediocre is an insult to anything that actually is mediocre. This Maigret through a modern lens isn't all bad, but it's not good. At all. The music is bland and unoriginal, unless it's trying to given me tinnitus with it's weird staccato jabs. Oh look, they're throwing in some strobe lighting to finish me off. The characters are all flat and uninteresting. Maigret is supposed to be mysterious and inscrutable but comes across as confused and possibly constipated. But what really annoyed me was the Britishness of it all. As this show finishes airing it's hopefully only season, a hope Wikipedia has dashed, I can't help think that in 2025 why are British actors playing French characters? I mean, they seem to be trying to do a more authentic take without stripping the Frenchness out of how criminal investigations go, even all signage and paperwork is in French. Yet with the cast they've got, even down to the meathead who so deserved that punch, I can't help thinking it's too disconnected. The casting and the conceit are clashing. The only time this show worked even a little was when Maigret was the butt of people's jokes. When Danny Kirrane, who was exceptional on The Serpent Queen as Louis de Bourbon, showed up as a childhood "frenemy" of Maigret's, Ferdinand Fumal, the filthy rich son of the butcher, then the show had something. The audience had, over the course of the first two episodes covering one investigation, learned to strongly dislike this taciturn detective, and to have an actor who reveals in his roles show up and just lay waste to Maigret was a kick in the balls the show needed. In fact it broke a damn and suddenly everyone was insulting Maigret and for each and every insult lobbed at him I felt a cathartic release. All these people were saying what I felt about this milquetoast man. If I am the target demographic for this show, then can I say, just maybe a Maigret dunking booth while he clutches his father's pipe which he will never smoke? I mean, it would save money. Or, you know, cancel the show. Because he won't work as an antihero and, when "Maigret's Failure" is Maigret himself, I don't think there's any hope for the show. It's not like the new Lynley where it's so anodyne it could become something better, here they've made it specific and generic at the same time and have just alienated their viewers.
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