Many Afterworders may have seen threads of the brilliant French crime thriller series Spiral over recent years, but felt left out because you were late to the party.
Well the party is starting all over again. Prior to showing Season 8 next year, BBC iPlayer has made all seven previous series available.
The plots are brilliant, engaging, thrilling, scary and superbly resolved.
Depending on your preference you can swoon over Audrey Fleurot or Grégory Fitoussi or Caroline Proust or Fred Bianconi. Or not.
I feel tempted to spend days, deep diving into the whole brilliant morass once again. Emerging occasionally from my darkened room to engage with the real world.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0074sk6/spiral-series-1-episode-1
The trailer link didn’t work – so here it is:
Available for 12 months. So we can remember Europe.
I’ve only seen series 2 and 3 so I’ll be taking the plunge at some point (hur)
8th and final series, sadly.
I don’t think any of the series dip at all so if you’ve not seen Spiral just start at the beginning.
I belive that series 8 has already been shown in France which is a bit frustrating.
And it’ll take ages to get over here because of the lorries at Dover.
Putain! I’ve already rewatched it once. Completely agree with the OP – brilliant series.
I only caught on with season 6, so I’ll be diving in at the start. Robust stuff.
I’m bingeing continuously, having missed it all the first time around. Nearly finished S06. The best TV cop series ever with no weak points (apart from the usual unlikeliness required to make a plot tick over – there are times when you have to get over the they-wouldn’t-do-that thing, just accept that they did and move on). Riveting performances, especially from the divine Caroline Proust, and Thierry Godard as Gilou. Love the office atmosphere, the bickering, Roban, Maitre Karlsson, and the unending stream of bad guys (that serial killer! Aaaaargh!). Delighted there’ll be another season!
Perfect timing, what with having just binged The Bridge (I was late to the scandi party)
Re: The Bridge – i loved it all and i was sceptical about the UK version, The Tunnel.
However…The Tunnel is also good. Episode 1 is a complete scene for scene copy of The Bridge but after that the differences make it a good watch and series 2 goes off on another tack,
The French version of Saga Noren doesn’t quite pull it off but it’s still a cut above lots of TV drama,
Its that French lass out of Harry Potter. And the Martin figure is yer man from Game of Thrones who lives on an island with a woman with a magic front bottom.
These people may have actual names.
Clémence Poésy.
Cheers, Ainsley; I’ll check that out. Several cuts above The Valhalla Murders, I expect!
We watched The Valhalla Murders in a single binge last night, and it was well done, even if we did feel we had seen it all before and shouted the same things at the screen (‘Call for back up! Or at least switch the bloody light on!!’)
I must admit we gave up on it after the first episode. Seemed a bit cliched which can be OK if the characters grab you…but they didn’t
In terms of plot, I think where we’d seen it all before was in Hinterland, with its children’s home abuse cover-up.
Try Fortitude. The Frozen North setting is amazing and brilliantly isolating, the plot scarily unhinged. Any cliches are deployed deliberately.
Great news!
It will be useful to brush up our French as so many of us will be on their side in the Mail declare war.
Je pour une bienvenue nous nouveaux seigneurs.
That is yer actual French.
Thanks. Weirdly I started watching this last night, and it was extremely poor picture quality, so get iplayer will have a work out.
Might have been down to the speed of your connection at the time. When the site’s working properly iPlayer automatically goes to a lower resolution if it detects a slow connection. It only needs one dodgy link on the route between you and the server. Sometimes leaving the iPlayer site and then reconnecting solves it.
No I meant this was an earlier file which I got from somewhere (not using Get_iPlayer) Can now use get_iPlayer to get a shiny new high quality file as it is available again.
At least the first 2 series were pre-HD so the picture quality isn’t great even on iPlayer
I have downloaded the first two seasons with get_iplayer and can confirm they are in HD
It’s possible they were upscaled from SD recordings. Broadcast upscalers are usually better than the one in your telly.
A minor point of order: “Freeview HD” is actually broadcast in ED (Extended Definition), i.e. 720i. All the stuff I have grabbed with get_iplayer is 720i.
True HD, as commonly accepted, is 1080 (as found on Blu-Ray) and above.
I am very dull (and used to work in TV broadcast).
I just watched the first episode of season 1 via iPad on an HD screen and it’s not very sharp. I’ll dig out the DVD later to compare.
They might be reporting as HD via the iPlayer but they certainly ain’t actually in HD. You can’t even buy them in HD from Amazon etc
BBC claim iPlayer is 720p or better.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/help/questions/features/hd-information#:~:text=To%20be%20classed%20as%20%22true,demands%20on%20your%20network%20connection.
Dare I say it doesn’t matter? It’s gritty and washed out looking. I don’t need it in gleaming remastered etc etc any more than I need a fine folio edition of Raymond Chandler.
Very rare for a series to maintain such exceptional quality across such a long run so am simultaneously really looking forward (it’ll be great) and not looking forward to this (It’ll be the end) at all.
Consistently excellent, the most successful French tv export ever, and also a great primer for sweary French:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2015/feb/20/pute-de-merde-de-con-the-linguistics-of-spiral-slang
I noted the use of “talkie” for walkie-talkie. First they get it backwards – they call them talkie-walkies, which is funny enough, then shorten it to talkie, which makes sense.
I will never get bored of saying Monsieur Joooge!
Spiral, of course, has several candidates for the most French looking Frenchman there is. My vote goes to Machard.
But, going back to the OP, Le Bureau is even better, although a right palaver watching it, as 2 series were on Prime, 2 on a Prime add on channel, and then I hunted down series 5 in the murky corners of the interweb. Brilliant series though. A spy thriller, rather than a cop show. But if you like Spiral and want something grittier, watch Braquo. Not a case of good cop-bad cop, more bad cop-worse cop.
Series 8 now being trailed by the BBC, starting on 2 January.
Huzzah! Hat thrown in air.
That will be Saturday evenings taken care of for a few weeks.
I am excite
Just started Series 8 last night. (As often seems to happen, it’s on in Oz before UK for some reason – less pressure on the schedules, perhaps. Same thing happened with Killing Eve.)
Laure is looking more careworn than ever – combination of the Gilou situation and managing a toddler, I guess. Happy to report that she’s still as fantastically sexy as ever, as is Maitre K. The sexual tension between her and her erstwhile cellmate could be cut with a knife, if there was a knife fit for that purpose. Might just be my overactive imagination, of course…
Your imagination is spot on, Señor thep – it was already as tense as a tense thing under extra tension in series 7.
I’m going to rewatch season 7 over Christmas in anticipation.
Not only is it back, back, back but ALL the Season 8 episodes are available on iPlayer so no need to wait 5 weeks to get through it.
and the first two episodes last night were every bit as good as you would hope, although I do miss Roban.
I’m warming very quickly to his replacement, though 😊
So is Beckriche.
Finished Season 8 at the weekend. No spoilers obvs as some will be watching 2 at a time but it’s a belter right to the end.
Season 8 thread needed?
What an ending! Finding out that – spoiler alert – DONOVAN was behind it all was a surprise.
Just finished series 8 and looked at the snapshots of all the series available on iplayer. Wow – don’t they all look incredibly young in Series 1?