“Murder Club” on M6, a comically macabre treasure hunt

Since the launch of Little Murders by Agatha Christie fifteen years ago on France 2 and the recent success of HPI on TF1, police comedies have multiplied in the audiovisual landscape, becoming a genre very popular with viewers. M6 is in turn launching into the niche with Murder Clubwhose screenplay, not credible for two cents but very entertaining, is co-written by Hélène Lombard, who actually studied on The Little Murders of Agatha Christie.

The four-episode mini-series takes up certain classic codes of crime fiction, such as the duo of atypical and mismatched investigators: Amélia Delcourt, a novice policewoman whose eagerness to prove herself leads to commit monumental blunders, and Daniel Hansen, a former star profiler, who became an outcast after falsely accusing a man. Dog and cat at the start of the series, the two antiheroes will ultimately collaborate to track down a formidable serial killer.

Tasty mise en abîme

The alchemy between Tiphaine Daviot and Éric Cantona works wonderfully and the thirty-year-old actress, awarded the Best Actress prize at the Séries Mania 2024 festival for this role, demonstrates her great comedic potential. A secondary character also stands out: Amélia's mother (played with relish by Catherine Hosmalin), a great lover of sordid news items and a fan of shows about the worst criminals in history such as “Bring in the Accused” .

The main asset of the series comes from this delicious presentation: full of contemporary references, Murder Club cheerfully mocks the morbid fascination with serial killers, through the staging of a “murder party”, a sort of macabre escape game, and a “murderabilia” – a contraction of murder and of memorabilia (souvenirs in Latin) –, an auction of objects found at crime scenes (inspired by real clandestine fairs organized on the darknet!). With Arielle Dombasle as perched as usual in the role of a collector.