“Captain Marleau” Season 4 – TV Series Review

One of the perks of increased time at home for the past few years has been discovering a slew of police/detective TV series dramas from about ten European countries. Their protagonists tend to be less action-oriented and more cerebral/intuitive than ours. Most also have some sort of family baggage or tragic backstory, making them moodier and more complex.

But in “Captain Marleau” (“Capitain Marleau”), we get a French super-cop who breaks the mold in a highly entertaining manner. Corinne Masiero’s eponymous troubleshooting Inspector Marleau has been solving knotty crimes for several years on French TV. Season 4 of her career is about to be released in the U.S. and more of her weird brilliance is just fine with me.

Tall, lanky and looking more like a forest-dwelling hobo than a cop, Marleau thrusts herself into each crime scene with the caustic wit of Dr. House, and the annoying persistence (or persistent annoyance) of Lt. Columbo. But she’s always using her abrasive in-your-face approach quite strategically. Each episode is self-contained, so it didn’t matter that I hadn’t started with the series’ 2014 debut. Those I first watched were from 2017 and 2019, as one could tell from various references and asides mentioning recent real-world events. This new quartet aired in 2022.

Each show has Marleau deployed to different villages, allowing her to irritate new sets of colleagues and parties of interest, while unraveling a mare’s nest of suspects and motives in solving their murder du jour. Though starting at the beginning is desirable, opening with these four new episodes would pose no continuity problems. The only differences from before are that her hair is grayer, and their running time is somewhat longer at around 110 minutes.

The first of these opens with a poisoned hairdresser connected to a local theater company with far more tangles among them than in all of the hairdos she’d coiffed. Their current production is “Othello,” which the script cleverly intertwines with the offstage murder. The second case gives up more of what makes Marleau tick, as she fends off department-ordered time with a shrink, ducking the doc’s overtures while nailing another killer. The third mixes financial and familial motives, both current and entailing echoes of old wounds, among the principals. The fourth stems from the actual killing of an officer in the middle of a town’s annual meticulously costumed and staged reenactment of a Napoleonic era battle, when a dueling pistol’s blank charge was given the old switcheroo with live ammo.

Though some of these might seem to have been stretched a bit to fill their time slots, the scripts still consistently deliver first-rate mixes of suspense and humor. Beyond that, it’s Masiero’s personality that makes this series stand out from the rest. The shows are generally low on overt violence and gore, and joyfully spiced up by her eccentricities. Masiero and the show have been nominated for several awards in France. She created a refreshingly engaging character who should thrive with genre fans on this side of the Atlantic as well.

“Captain Marleau” Season 4, mostly in French with English subtitles, is available streaming on July 11 on MHzChoice.

RATING: 3 out of 4 stars