M6+ – ON DEMAND – MINISERIES
Good surprise from a French selection that is otherwise a little dull, Murder Club had earned its main performer, Tiphaine Daviot, the best actress prize at the Séries Mania festival in March. The award is deserved for this actress with an all-purpose face and communicative energy, who is increasingly present on television − we recently saw her in the series The Hikerson TF1. Murder Club relies as much on its actress as on its plot, ultimately quite well-defined, as well as on its gently mocking tone, which mocks the contemporary fascination with news items.
Fed with “Bring in the accused” by a tenderly intrusive mother, Amélia Delcourt (Tiphaine Daviot) only dreams of major investigations, but was removed from the Crime after a big mistake which allowed “Shakespeare”, signature of a serial killer who terrorizes the region, to escape. The young woman, reinstated in the team, and her colleagues are launched on the trail of a missing teenager, a case for which she seeks the support of a renowned but tired and addicted criminologist.
Dose of self-deprecation
A great specialist in “Shakespeare”, Daniel (Eric Cantona) will help Amélia and his team to make the link between him and an older killer, whose memory fascinates the entire local community of amateur detectives and collectors of “murderabilia”, these artifacts that were used to perpetrate crimes or that belonged to major psychopaths, sold at auction by an auctioneer played with panache and a certain sense of kitsch by Arielle Dombasle.
All this doesn’t change much from the usual thrillers from the big channels − Murder Club will have difficulty carving out a place alongside them – if not for the writing, a little looser than average, and the desire to add a dose of self-mockery to the codes of the genre. The series thus advances in balance between comedy and thriller, without ever really choosing. We feel the desire not to do too much, and the efforts not to fall into parody or caricature the characters of Amélia and Daniel too much. This allows the series to avoid most of the traps of the prime time thriller – archetypal characters and autopilot plot – but confines it to familiar territory.
In four episodes too short to be bored, Murder Club however preserves the idea of a second season, and we hope for a slightly freer, more written sequel, which would rely more on its actors and its secondary plots. A season which would push the cursors and allow, perhaps, Amélia Delcourt to compete with Morgane Alvaro and HPI.
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