Engrenages

It's now four episodes in to Spiral and I'm still not sure what I think of it.

On one hand, I like it quite a lot. It's French and on the whole, French productions screened on SBS tend to be of quite a good quality. Apart from that, French is a language I always wanted to learn and it's enjoyable to pick up bits and pieces like a crow attracted to shiny bits of speech. The way it's shot reminds me of the Tungsten setting on my camera. The senior judge amuses me somehow. Caroline Proust is good.

And yet...

It annoys me. I want to know what happened to the murdered Romanian girl, and yet that storyline seems to be going to be dragged out for the entire series and currently it doesn't feel like it's progressed at all, but is idling. Perhaps it's a short attention span brought on by such things as Law & Order when younger, but this was the sort of thing that put me off of watching The Bill when it went all soap opera. I feel almost compelled, but not in a good way, to watch because I don't want to miss bits of the puzzle, and yet nothing seems to happen. The chief prosecutor annoys me, even though he's gorgeous (and French!). The cop who uses coke irritates me deeply. I hope the Romanian guy gets run over by a bus.

But I want to know what happens, I want a resolution to the story we started out with way back in episode one. I want to find out if it's an exploration of a sick society or a sick judicial system - or both? And what about this medicine-making lab?

Drat it.