Inspector Jules Maigret is a quiet and seemingly reserved man, wearing a bowler hat and smoking a pipe. At first glance, wearing an elegant overcoat, he looks nothing like a typical hardened policeman, but in fact he is in charge of the Criminal Brigade in the famous Quai des Orfèvres headquarters in Paris. His reputation as a man, who solves the most complicated cases, reaches far beyond the French capital. How he does it? Instead of bursting in with guns blazing, he prefers observation and trying to figure out what motivation lied beyond the crime that was committed, thus finding a culprit.
Maigret was the main character of over 70 novels by Belgian author Georges Simenon, in each of them, the inspector and his men were taking on another case, most of which seemed to have no clues, but through his patient approach and unique methods, Maigret was able to solve them. The 2016 adaptation, starring Rowan Atkinson, was the third such attempt made by a British television (after 1988 starring Richard Harris and 1992 starring Michael Gambon).
While the choice of a comedian to play the main character might have looked questionable, Atkinson (privately a fan of Georges Simenon books) did an outstanding job building the character. Unfortunately, only four books were turned into 90-minutes-long episodes. The series recreated well the atmosphere of Paris present in the novels by Simenon, yet the choice of the books to adapt was somehow questionable, there were some problems with pacing and the scripts written by Stewart Harcourt in some cases were in a style far from the original material.
Overall, an interesting adaptation, unfortunately cut short, most likely due to the format of the episodes not really fitting with the style of Simenon books.
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Maigret
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