The New French Connection

Eddy Caplan is about to arrive on British TV, and the bedlam he creates makes him one of the great dirty cops. If you like your drama subtitled and your storylines the strength of an unfiltered Gauloises pleasantly sweetened with Gallic boobs, you'll hit paydirt on Sunday night with Braquo – the latest acclaimed European police drama. Like that other import Spiral, Braquo is set in Paris, comes courtesy of Canal+ and concerns itself with law enforcers who can't see a rule without breaking it. This time, however, you'll find the action on FX, rather than BBC4. The eagily anticipated second series- in part directed by A Prophet's Jacques Audiard- will air on the French cable channel in November at the same time as work commenses on season three.

Braquo will inevitably be compared to The Wire – a comparison underwritten by the fact that Canal+, effectively France’s “fourth TV channel”, seems to have been forged in the image of HBO, with its strong adult fare and subscription base. It bears some similarity: it’s gritty and handheld and exposes the dark underbelly of a large city; its central quartet of cops are prone to “crossing the line” in order to bring justice to scumbags, and their maverick methodology means they rub up against their chiefs on a regular basis. Braquo‘s creator, writer and predominant season-one director Olivier Marchal, was once a cop, so he has that in common with The Wire‘s co-creator Ed Burns. Oh, and it also employs novelists as writers. The thing that makes it different from The Wire is that it is not especially interested in the criminals.


So be warned: even if you're a hardened three-series Spiral veteran, you might still get a shock, suggests the Guardian's James Donaghy. Berthaud's crime squad were no pussycats but Caplan's SDPJ 92 crew (Hauts-de-Seine's district police department) ratchet up the bedlam and violence to new levels. There's a nice moment of Gallic stroppiness in this bruising new drama when the police brass have called a meeting to soft soap the rank and file, and a female lieutenant flounces out. When her mate, Caplan, follows, his boss says they are not finished. 'We are,' Eddie says, and that's it, meeting over as the whole unit departs.

Eddie and the lieutenant, Roxane, along with two captains, Walter and Theo, are furious that their leader, Max, has been buried in disgrace after committing suicide. He was in custody for stabbing a rape suspect in the eye, and someone has leaked an accusation from the suspect, Benaissa, that Max sexually abused him. Not the types to be messed around, particularly when a comrade and his family have been dissed, the quartet take matters into their own hands and launch a reckless and violent campaign to put matters straight. Ostensibly, therefore, their mission is clear but you get the distinct feeling that the Braquo cops just see mayhem as an end in itself. As The Shield showed, absolute power intoxicates.

Of course, all cops shows genuflect to American culture, and it’s there in Braquo, but it’s peculiarly Gallic, too, very moody and a touch existential. Just like The Shield, it is utterly compelling. If Braquo were a colour it could only be noir, from the black leather jackets to the dark ambivalent morals of this desperate bunch of cops, writes Crime Time Preview's Robin Jarossi. As directed by Marchal, who also made 36 Quai des Orfevres, it is far more hard-hitting than any cop series produced in the UK. Like Spiral, this doesn't portray les flics by half measures. These guys steal from the crooks, snort coke and seem to have a bar in the cinematically dingy warehouse that seems to pass as a police station in the suburbs of Paris. It is an atmospheric, tactile base for our rogue cops; and the bar, it turns out, is not a wishful fantasy. So this is a glimpse into the world of French urban policing that has its own attractions for a foreign audience. If it is based on Marchal's actual experience in the French force, it would be advisable to give them a very wide berth next time you're in Paris.

Interestingly Marchal reveals one of the key influences on his show in terms of style and story was not The Wire or The Shield, but rather a lesser-known American cop drama; namely, Joe Carnahan’s Narc from 2002 starring Ray Liotta. The critics admired that show as it seemed to hark back to 70s classics like The French Connection, which is nice, as there really is a French connection now, quips the Never Knowingly Underwhelmed Andrew Collins.