Candice Renoir
So,
they cancel Doctor Blake , leaving a
lot unresolved. There may have been good
reasons for it, in the real world, but given the interior reality of the show,
it was hugely disappointing. Craig
McLachlan left under a cloud, and you can’t
lose your lead actor, and then try to paper it over by pretending the character
abandoned his life and livelihood, turning his back on everything we knew him to
value. It’s insulting. Everybody who watched Bonanza knew Dan Blocker had died.
The writers didn’t have to conjure up a phony exit for him – Hoss fell
down a well? – when the audience had already skipped ahead to the end.
The
point about Blake is that they got
caught on the back foot, as I understand it.
They tried cobbling something together, and it didn’t work, in spite of
the best efforts of Nadine Garner, a marvelous actress put in an awkward
situation. I had much the same response
when The Coroner wasn’t renewed after
its second season; I was distressed when Island
at War didn’t continue. I had an investment in those characters.
What’s
a girl to do? I’ve watched all the
current episodes of Death in Paradise ,
and I’m biting my nails waiting for Bosch:
Legacy to pick up where they left off – horrific cliffhanger this past season. There’s a good New Zealand cop series called Brokenwood , and it turns out that both Unforgotten and Shetland are shooting new seasons, in spite of the leads leaving,
but meanwhile.
To the
rescue comes Candice Renoir , a French
policier , streaming on Acorn. (BritBox and Acorn are both available as
add-ons with Amazon Prime. Worth
it.) The premise is a working mom, four
kids, back in harness running the small major crimes unit in a lesser
Mediterranean port city, not so fashionable as Nice or as mobbed up as
Marseille. Her immediate superior, the commissaire , is a younger career woman,
chilly and ambitious, her second-in-command is the guy who should have gotten
the job, and resents her taking over. Then
there’s the good-looking neighbor, and the ex floating around, and the cute
undercover cop in the next office, and so on.
I know. It sounds like a
truckload of clich é s, or just
too cute for school. However. What could be annoying and generic is
actually charming and original.
The
chief asset is the casting. C é cile Bois, in the lead, sells it from
the get-go. I didn’t know her from a
hole in a ground. She was forty and a
little when the show premiered, and she presents at first as slightly Barbie,
but it’s protective coloration. Close
behind are the other cops on the team, and the kids who play her family. The trick, of course, is to make this
convincing in a few bold strokes, because it’s essentially a situation
dramedy. The kids are attitude, and a
quick pose; so are the cops, for that matter.
The characterizations aren’t that deep – you have to take them on faith
– but they get spikier, and more unexpected, as the relationships develop.
The
crimes are a mixed bag, not always really ready for prime time, and the police
work is sometimes perfunctory and not terribly authentic, quite honestly. I don’t know that this is that much of a
weakness. The show is character-driven,
but when the plotting is ingenious
(and it is more often than not), that emphasizes the strength of the character
dynamics.
There
is one technical fumble that’s odd. The
show is broadcast in French. The
subtitles lag slightly behind the audio, so an English speaker is always
playing catch-up, and sometimes the dialogue is too fast and clever. It helps to have a little half-remembered high
school French, although the slang is well beyond what I remember from high school.
Quel b ê tise .
