Crime thrillers still wear the crown, but alongside them, France and Belgium are producing and exporting more continuing television dramas and miniseries than ever. In the last five years, coinciding with the global growth of scripted TV drama, that’s all changed. While the French ‘polar’ or detective series had long been a television staple, France had almost no tradition of sci-fi, horror and fantasy TV shows – or at least, none taken seriously by its understandably cinephile-and-proud cultural gatekeepers. The story of a remote mountain town whose dead are mysteriously revived, its stylish, cinematic look and philosophical, grown-up approach to genre television had little precedent. When acclaimed supernatural series Les Revenants/ The Returned aired on Canal+ in 2012, it emerged into a fairly barren landscape for French-language scripted TV drama.
