Puh-leeze.īut wait, there’s more! Characters weren’t set up well, action moved at too fast a clip, and details that could have made the stories more compelling were omitted, all for the sake of getting episodes down to the roughly 45 minutes that are standard for US TV dramas.Īnd as much as I hate to say it, even the acting was meh or sub-par. And sorry, I just don’t buy that every member of the investigating team was so up on religious history that they all agreed the killer posed the victim’s body thusly to symbolize the dead man won’t hear the angels’ trumpets or receive God’s forgiveness. This was payback.” Not even The Mentalist would have arrived at this conclusion so quickly. Then, after looking up at the bas-relief on the cathedral’s facade, determined straight off that “The killer is sending a message. For example: In an early scene in the “Notre Dame” episode, Jo saw the bloodied victim on the ground and, without having taken a closer look, declared the man’s eardrum had been pierced. The latter example didn’t even track with what the witness actually said, so continuity was an issue, too.Īdd to this certain bits of the action. The dialogue ranged from utterly lame (“At some point, Jo, arguing with you stops being a sport, it becomes a death march.”) to nowhere near credible (“Witness found him at 5:15 AM with no watch, no ID, no money.”), owing to the character not having checked. Jo’s estranged daughter, Adèle Gauthier, is played by Icelandic actress Heida Reed ( Poldark), while her boyfriend, Yannick Morin, is played by the English Chris Brazier ( Coronation Street), and the confidante to all three is the non-habit-wearing nun, Sister Karyn, played by Canadian actress Jill Hennessy ( Crossing Jordan). Jo’s partner, Marc Bayard, is played by Englishman Tom Austen ( Grantchester), tech wiz Nick Normand is played by Welsh actor Celyn Jones ( Above Suspicion), medical expert Angélique Alassane is played by the Nigerian/British Wunmi Mosaku ( Vera), and their sober boss, Béatrice Dormont, is played by the Irish Orla Brady ( Eternal Law). (Also maddening was why some place names, such as Neuilly, were pronounced en français while others, like Saint Cloud, weren’t.) Thank gawd.) Some actors did better with sounding like Middle America, while for others it was easily discernible that the accent didn’t roll off their tongues. (Jo/Reno spoke English with his delicious French accent. One of the things that irked me to no end was the Americanized English spoken by nearly every character (down to extras with a line or two), most of whom were supposed to be French, but were played by actors who are neither French nor American. I'd love it then.Here’s the deal: The team behind the series, including Canadian/Quebecois writer and creator René Balcer ( Law & Order franchise), Danish directors Kristoffer Nyholm ( The Killing) and Charlotte Sieling ( Unit One), and British director Stefan Schwartz ( Luther), tried too hard to make Jo an international hit.ĭescribed as a detective drama with “mini The Da Vinci Code” episodes, Jo is set in Paris, where iconic landmarks and neighborhoods such as Notre Dame and Pigalle serve as the backdrops for the crimes the intense, heart-attack-surviving Jo St-Clair (Reno) and his team investigate. It sounds great on paper, but on screen it’s a mess. St-Clair's struggle with drink and drugs is only touched on, but perhaps it's early days in the series. Only Reno's character St-Clair has a back-story, which makes the program too shallow. Tom Austen the sidekick is good, pretty and the flirty cop who gets all the ladies to open up with information - well cast - but I would like to see some reason why he's working in Paris and hear him attempting to speak French occasionally. The script is too staccato because the action is stilted due to the contrived leaps, and even Reno can't raise this show to above 5/10 for me. The producers missed a trick by making it too much like all the other investigative procedurals that are on US and UK TV at present - if the only thing different is that it's set against Parisian architecture, that's not a good enough reason to watch. He's investigating random murders (being a homicide cop) but everyone is English! Everyone! Even if they spoke with cheesy French accents it would have made more sense. Reno plays it French but everyone else is either American or British and I don't get that. Jean Reno is wasted and the plot is interesting in terms of story lines but the police-procedure is so contrived, and whilst it's not entirely predictable, it's full of leaps in investigation. I understand that the series has to appeal internationally (and by that I mean Americans), but it's totally NOT French. I was looking forward to some gritty French drama series, starring the incredibly talented Jean Reno.
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