Date of airing: April 20, 2021 (La Une, Belgium), April 29, 2021 (TF1, France)
Audience information: 9.78 million viewers, 38.4 percent share with Viewers 4+ (TF1, France)
Story by: Alice Chegaray-Breugnot, Stéphane Carrié, Nicolas Jean
Teleplay by: Alice Chegaray-Breugnot
Directed by: Vincent Jamain
”Never wanted to work for the police?”
“I? At the police?”
“To help people and save lives. Not a bad job, mind you.”
“Fine people, throw tear gas, and deport illegal immigrants? No, it is not.”
How annoying can Morgane get after a couple of episodes? It's a question I dare to ask now, because I can already see it happening, with her rowdy and unruly behavior at times. Someone in her life didn't give her enough decency lessons, so here she is, short skirt, long cleavage, and a general disinterest in people around her who aren't part of her immediate family. It might add to the comedy of the show, but when she is the only (annoyingly) unique character among a bunch of normal people, then she can easily turn into the first character of the show I wish death and torture upon. So, here is to hoping that she is a good person. She already is a little bit racist, imitating Asian people, so I doubt she is a good person through and through.
But the show will have to live through Morgane as the one and only unique character. Whether or not you can make a good and long-lasting show in the crime procedural genre always depends on the writing of the murder investigations, and as we know from American television, crime procedurals tend to fail a lot more often than they succeed. HPI will have the same problem, but now I get to learn whether or not French television writers have their own sense of style when writing TV, or if they watched a few too many American TV shows of the crime genre, and HPI is essentially just another crime procedural that you could find on CBS in the mid-2000s.
After one episode, it's probably the latter. I will have forgotten the murder investigation after a couple of days, but it looks like the setup consists of the uniqueness of Morgane as a character more than the crime stuff, so maybe there is a good show hiding behind the premise after all. Good enough for ABC to remake it in 2024?
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| Morgane won't stop making her opinions about the police known. |
