Four series to see, from the banks of the Sambre to the first colony on Mars

THE MORNING LIST

The long hunt for the Sambre rapist, a new stage in the conquest of space that could have been, the French escape from an American blockbuster, an adaptation by Edith Wharton: when the series kitchen is running at full speed, the menu becomes very rich.

“Sambre”: evil over time

For more than three decades, a man women on the banks of the Sambre, on the border between France and Belgium, without ever changing much in the method of his crimes. He was only arrested in 2018. Based on the investigation by journalist Alice Géraud (Sambre, fluoroscopy of a news itemJean-Claude Lattès, 400 p., 21.50 euros), who is here co-writer with Marc Herpoux, Jean-Xavier de Lestrade undertook to give dramatic form to this interminable non-event, to this tragedy which is based on the the deliberate anonymity of the rapist, who hides his face, on the forced anonymity of the victims, whose complaints (in every sense of the word) were ignored, misheard, clified… Sambre, terrible story that the precision and solemnity of the production and the commitment of the performers finally makes visible, audible, changes with each episode of point of view: that of a victim, first, embodied by Alix Poisson whose character, with that of the policeman played by Julien Frison, will be the only one that we will find throughout the series. Next will come a magistrate (Pauline Parigot), a mayor (Noémie Lvovsky) and a scientist (Clémence Poésy) who will each try to arrest the criminal (Jonathan Turnbull), whose identity is revealed in the first sequences. Over the years, we see attitudes and police methods change – so slowly – while man’s violence remains unchanged. T.S.

“For All Mankind”, season 4: cl struggle on Mars

For the fourth time, the creators of For All Mankind invite us to take a leap back in time. Like the previous ones, this season is separated from the previous one by an eight-year gap. In the alternate timeline invented by Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi, it is 2003. Al Gore is in the White House, Mikhail Gorbachev in the Kremlin. Confined in the base established on Mars by the American, Soviet and European space agencies, North Koreans, Chinese and Indians coexist with the private operator Helios. The original victory of the USSR, arriving first on the Moon, propelled the story onto another trajectory that the screenwriters like to shape, between strangeness and familiarity (one of the most successful features of this gigantic device is to the soundtrack; everything has changed, except American popular music, and the beginnings of mining on Mars are to the strains of the Strokes’ first hits). Like always, For All Mankind adds a new theme and this season largely revolves around the creation of a space proletariat, which opposes the aristocracy of the pioneers. Both camps are solidly embodied (the workers by Toby Kebbell, the new bosses by Krys Marshall), and the series continues to amaze and worry about the capabilities of humankind. T.S.

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