The French are masters of morbid melodrama
The plot of Witnesses (Channel 4) was not for the fainthearted: in a show home in a coastal French town, someone had arranged three newly dead, exhumed bodies so that they looked like the perfect family. To make matters worse, this wasn’t the first time it had happened – a similar, still unsolved crime had taken place one month earlier.
Placed on a table near the bodies was a picture of recently retired detective Paul Maisonneuve (Thierry Lhermitte) who had had a terrible time of late, having been widowed and then spent two weeks in a coma following a car crash. He also happened to have a past bulging with secrets.
Witnesses marks Channel 4’s latest attempt to get a slice of the foreignlanguage drama market, so cleverly cornered by BBC Four. Its previous journey into French TV was the Emmy-winning existential zombie thriller The Returned.
This new police procedural is not dissimilar from your everyday bleak, noirish crime drama. There’s little here that we’ve not seen before: cold, grey tones, an attractive detective with personal problems and an unshakeable work ethic, a methodical perpetrator, and a killer cliffhanger. We’re firmly in the territory of The
Killing and The Bridge here. But more of the same isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and Witnesses certainly doesn’t let the side down, sprinkling enough secrets and curiosities through the narrative to hook viewers in for episode two.
What gives Witnesses its own identity is that its particularly morbid plot makes it arguably even creepier than anything else to come out of Scandinavia. Plus, it’s not often that a funicular is used for a sinister set piece.
Marie Dompnier, as Detective Sandra Winckler, puts in a solid performance – while managing to crack a few more smiles than her noir crime counterparts. And, being only six episodes long, we hopefully won’t be forced to endure the half-dozen or so red herrings that the first series of
The Killing put us through. But for Maisonneuve to be the culprit, as Winckler says, that would be “too easy”. Or would it?
The gritty Australian drama
Wentworth Prison made a tense, action-packed return to Channel 5, three months after its Australian broadcast.
For the uninitiated, its premise is mildly confusing: it’s a prequel to the Seventies drama, Prisoner: Cell Block
H, but is set in the present day. Do not be fooled by comparisons with its source material, however. Prisoner may have dealt with some difficult issues, but it was decidedly soapy in nature. In Wentworth Prison, there’s barely a sud in sight.
It tells the early story of Bea Smith, who was played by Val Lehman in the Seventies, and now by Danielle Cormack. This opening episode of the third series began with a slick montage, recapping her trajectory from terrified, abused wife to prison top dog.
When we last saw Bea she had murdered her rival Jacs (Kris McQuade), escaped from prison, tracked down Jacs’s teenage son – who was responsible for the death of Bea’s daughter Debbie – and executed him while prison guard Will Jackson (Robbie Magasiva) looked on helplessly. Now, several weeks later, Queen Bea was back behind bars and sentenced to life without parole.
The sadistic governor, Joan “The Freak” Ferguson (Pamela Rabe), who is admittedly rather a two-dimensional baddie, had been left with her reputation in tatters after Bea’s escape, and was attempting to rule the prison with an iron fist – both to rescue her image and to make herself feel better. She managed neither. Instead, she only served to create an even more tense atmosphere in the prison.
Denying the prisoners their cigarettes became the last straw and, following a signal from the segregated Bea, they set the place on fire, having built a bonfire of mattresses in the yard.
Once Bea had rejoined the rest of the rioting inmates, and a practically frothing Ferguson finally emerged from the safety of the CCTV room, there followed a neck prickling faceoff between the two women.
“You don’t run this prison, I do,” Bea snarled before swaggering off to the booming sound of the Imagine Dragons’ track Radioactive. Opening the series with a full-on prison riot was certainly a bold move. But then this drama has never been known to pull its punches.