Spiral – French cop drama with universal appeal

The French word engrenages meaning gears, or gearing, hints at the possibility of sudden changes of speed or direction. But as the title of a cop show, it was never going to work outside of France, which is why someone came up with the more workaday alternative, Spiral.

But what’s in a name? The series, now in its eighth season on Canal + in France and half-way through season 7 on BBC 4, is one of the finest, and grittiest, detective shows on television, fully meriting the acclaim it has won in 70 countries across the globe, including the United States.

Its leading characters, making up a plainclothes detective squad in one of the less salubrious quartiers of Paris, are entirely believable, wholly gallic (with a garlic aftertaste) and 100 per cent universal.

First up we have Laure (Caroline Proust), the capitaine, or chief inspector, in her forties, sexually wayward, and vulnerable, who never leaves the office without her trusty SP 2022 pistol and sky-blue evidence gloves. Laure dresses like the 1960s rockstar Julie Driscoll – leather jerkin over jeans and a revealing t-shirt. She likes nothing more than a good car chase or the opportunity to scramble over a backyard wall. But she is also a thinker, usually one step ahead of her team, whom she defends to the higher-ups in the manner of a she-bear protecting her cubs.

By her side is the trusty Gilou (Thierry Godard), a long-time lieutenant, who provides both the empathetic insight that Laure lacks and the muscle required to beat the crap out of a villain or, back at the station, to encourage a reluctant confession. Gilou has been known to help himself from time to time when recovering stolen goods. Well, he’s got bills to pay, and on the money he makes, who could blame him? But he is otherwise generous and good-hearted – the sort of man you would depend on to beat up a rapist but might not choose to leave alone with your wife. He never seems to change his clothes. Either that or he keeps a number of identical ensembles. Nor does he spend much time with his razor, yet never quite grows a beard. If this was 1972, he would be played, with a cigarette, by Jean-Paul Belmondo.

In season six, Laure and Gilou finally get it together, which we have been expecting since at least season three. They can’t keep their hands off each other. But it is not to be, or at any rate wasn’t as far as episode two of season seven, which is as far as I’ve got. Laure went through a breakdown, you see, after she realised (correctly – she only had to ask me) that she was not cut out to be the mother of the child she bore following a disastrous affair with a married man. Poor Gilou, who was left holding a stuffed panda rather than the baby (which he had rather optimistically undertaken to raise with her), despairs and throws himself back into the job with a vengeance, at which point watch out, low-lifes.

The third wheel in this damaged police vehicle is “Tintin” (Fred Bianconi), another long-serving lieutenant, whose marriage is falling apart, leading to mood-swings that his chers colleagues, while sympathetic, find more than a little irritating. Tintin is the procedures and paperwork man, without whom, as we discover, the work of the team is fatally undermined. But he is also impulsive and brave, intervening more than once to keep his more reckless colleagues from being beaten to a pulp. At the end of season six, he flounces off, affronted by the discovery that Gilou has briefly pocketed some stolen gold and that Laure, as his lover, has helped him cover it up. But he comes back in season seven in order, I suspect, to tie up loose ends.

You might think that all this would be quite enough to keep the show moving along at a brisk pace. Crucially, however, Spiral is not all about the cops. Adding another rich dollop of spice to the proceedings are the ornately-gowned lawyers – especially the flame-haired temptress, “Maitre” Josephine (Audrey Fleurot) – and the extravagantly ascetic juge d’instruction, or examining magistrate, Roban (Philippe Duclos).

In the long-running US series Law and Order, the division between the police investigation and the inevitable court case that follows is clear-cut. One starts when the other stops. In Spiral, the two interweave throughout. Each needs the other to get the work done, but – merde! – they don’t have to like each other.

Josephine – who despises Roban – serves both as a superbly equipped (in every sense) defence lawyer and as an old-fashioned object of desire, moving from one set of chambers to the next, cutting a swathe through a legal Establishment that thinks it knows what she’s up to and plans to bring her down, but still ends up, to a man, staring down her décolletage. She gets her come-uppance in season seven when she is had up for trying to murder her boss after she discovers that he was the one who drugged and raped her. But I’m guessing that after four purgatorial months spent in one of France’s notorious prisons, she gets off, chalking the whole thing down to experience. If she doesn’t, I, for one, shall be extremely disappointed.

Roban, meanwhile, like a Catholic bishop tortured by doubt, does his utmost to assist Laure, with whom he maintains a respectful relationship, but can’t stop himself from obstructing her every time she and her team fail to share his pious interpretation of the evidence as it unfolds. He has learned from long experience that corruption runs from top to bottom in the system and that most of his judicial colleagues are self-serving mountebanks. He likes to think of himself as the only honest man in Paris. Deep-down, though, he knows that he, too, is capable of bending the truth. If Molière had written the part of Roban – and I doubt he would have done it any better than the actual scriptwriters – the result would have been a piece called something like The Honest Hypocrite.

All fictional detectives cut corners. Tension between the pencil-pushers of the executive corridor and the hard nuts who do the actual work is one of the best-worked clichés of the genre. The difference in Spiral is that the corners come pre-cut. Going by the book and due process is just the unavoidable precursor to getting on with the serious business. What really matters is putting the frighteners on the bad guys until they finally crack and spill their guts – a case not so much of Good Cop/Bad Cop as Bad and Badder.

I read somewhere that the producers and writers of Spiral, particularly in its later guise, are proud of the fact that their characters – whatever their personal inclinations – are obliged to stick to the rules. If so, it is hard to imagine what they would be like if let off the leash. But then, in real life, French Police are not best known for wearing kid gloves. They go in hard, especially in the banlieues of Paris and other big cities, where there are large immigrant communities and a backdrop of lawlessness. I suspect the show is watched avidly by actual police officers and lawyers, who see in it a true reflection of the challenges they face.

Spiral is grimy and morally ambiguous, set in a Paris in which the Eiffel Tower and the Seine are never seen and lunch is a sandwich eaten while scrolling through the latest CCTV footage. Justice is usually done in the end, but the suspicion is that for every bad guy taken off the streets there will be another, even more violent and more rapacious, ready to take his place. It is not so much that there are eight million stories in the naked city as the same story repeated, with twists, time and time again.

Enjoy!

Spiral, season 7, is available on BBC iPlayer for the next month