The Paris Murders is a perfect binge: 10 seasons of sleuthing

The Paris Murders is fresh and well, French, in that indefinable way that combines balanced coolness with charm.

Odile Vuillemin as Chloe Saint-Laurent, the profiling psychologist in The Paris Murders (Profilage).

French television has been having a moment in recent years with the global success of shows such as Spiral, Call My Agent!, The Bureau and especially Lupin – when that smart, stylish and self-aware caper series became Netflix’s most-watched global program, French newspapers said in triumph that the world was now “chaud lupin” for French TV, meaning, it seems, horny for shows coming out of its studios.

They also called it the “new French wave”, echoing the Parisian cinematic movement of the late 1950s with its improvisational, existential storytelling in the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, and Eric Rohmer. As Martin Scorsese said: “The French New Wave has influenced all filmmakers who have worked since, whether they saw the films or not. It submerged cinema like a tidal wave.”

Well, this hasn’t happened with French TV, but it certainly has found an audience delighting in its stories and offbeat charm.

I’ve only just discovered Profilage, also known as The Paris Murders, from Fanny Robert and Sophie Lebarbier, a Parisian cop procedural that follows the somewhat zany inquiries of criminalist Chloe Saint-Laurent, the title translating as Profiler.

She’s an investigator who specialises in deductive and inductive reasoning along with statistical probability to build a profile of a specific criminal based on the characteristics of the crime that has been committed. And who does it in the most unusual, usually eccentric and puzzling ways.

It’s a show that sits at the intersection between psychology and law enforcement, Saint-Laurent in moments of serendipity untangling suspected criminal offenders’ behaviours, emotions and personalities, enabling her squad to bring them to justice.

Yes, I know the profiler notion has had a long run on TV, shows such as Wire in the Blood, Cracker, Criminal Minds and Mindhunter among them.

And in real life, while a kind of early criminal profiling used in the 1880s was even prominent in the hunt for Jack the Ripper, its formal designation dates to 1972. This is when the FBI created the behavioural science unit examining the psychology of offenders in the hope of predicting the patterns and practices of future offenders – and to apprehend them faster.

The TV cop procedural dates to Jack Webb’s 1952 Dragnet, the term invented to describe it, the realistic crime drama becoming the focus of parody – St George and the Dragonet anyone? – and reverent homage.

The Paris Murders, though, is fresh and well, French, in that indefinable way that combines balanced coolness with charm and nonchalance, and it’s a show that embraces its cliches with loving enthusiasm, happy to indulge in grassroots kitsch.

Umberto Eco once described cult movies as works that provide “a completely furnished world so that the fans can quote characters and episodes as if they were aspects of the fan’s private sectarian world”. And Paris Murders is now, after 10 seasons and 102 episodes, something of a cult TV show.

Omar Sy as Lupin, in season three.

But it’s also an edgy watch at times, its content often surprising with tales of darkness, confusion, blood and horror.

You’ll notice the show comes with the pink endorsement WP, which stands for Walter Presents, a video-on-demand service featuring the best international television series from around the world, which began broadcasting in 2015, backed by Britain’s Channel 4.

It’s named after critic and producer Walter Iuzzolino, an enthusiast whose name has become synonymous with the best foreign titles.

He says his business model is similar to a small publishing house and his imprimatur is usually a guarantee of entertaining, sophisticated viewing. Each show is hand-picked from hours of intent watching, and he never uses algorithms to select them, each speaking to the best in film grammar, pacing and writing.

“It’s not designed to make you feel clever or to exclude people who don’t have an upbringing in cinema or German Expressionism,” he says of his method. “These are broad, populist stories.” As he suggests, we are past the stage where subtitles are a turn-off, these days used to watching the original performances in their entirety and allow the often pleasurable feeling of intersecting with the culture that subtitles allow.

Iuzzolino says the experience is more intense because it’s more of an effort to watch than listening to dubbing, closer to the novel. “And the fact that you have to invest more makes it less of a kind of disposable, trashy, watch-and-go-to-bed experience and more of a cinema night.”

With all seasons of The Paris Murders available on Binge it’s easy to have a night in with the charming characters from the Third Division of Paris’s Judicial Police at their headquarters at the port of La Tournelle on the Seine between the Pont de Sully and the Pont de l’Archeveche.

Jack Webb played Sgt. Friday in TV’s Dragnet.

The cast has changed a little over the seasons, but Philippe Bas as Commander Thomas Rocher is there after the first seasons, the boss of the unit and heart-throb of the show; Jean-Michel Martial plays Lamarck, the overall chief; with the delightful Vanessa Valence as the flirtatious Fred Kancel. who also happens to be a hard-nosed investigator. Then there’s Raphael Ferret’s tech guy, the sarcastic and funny computer dude who has a running platonic kind of relationship with Kancel, or does he?

The star though is undoubtedly Odile ­Vuillemin’s Chloe Saint-Laurent, the profiling psychologist of the title, who disregards all police practice, procedures and sensibilities. She neither knows nor cares all that much, delighting in prancing around on her delicate heels, a huge, bright yellow handbag dangling precariously from her arm. She is beguilement personified and a delight to watch, with her coloured short dresses, her sexy awkwardness, and that flaming red hair, so often flying across her face, concealing her pale blue-green eyes.

While Chloe’s investigations are often a fey delight, at least to start with, there’s often a gothic edge to them, marking out slightly different territory to many of the other procedural cop shows around.

The plot lines are usually edgy and distressing. A young woman is found dead with her mouth stapled shut; did someone want to silence her? A concierge is brutally beaten to death and a room full of mannequins is their only lead? Is a sanctuary for children turning them into killers? Why is someone is targeting women, shaving their heads, and stuffing them inside animals? When a family is found dead, each missing a hand, is it a sign of faith or the sign of a ­psychopath?

These are just a couple of examples from 102 episodes, most of the stories, it seems, based on actual cases.

In the show’s odd meshing of hard-boiled story­telling, affecting drama and eccentrically comic relationships, like so many new French TV shows it reveals how French writers are channelling the nation’s anxieties – social, political, and cultural – into classy, sometimes disturbing ­stories.

Bureaucratic intransigence, economic anxiety and collective psychological trauma often feature as narrative themes; often there is a sense of “France on the couch”, to paraphrase a comment from writer Benjamin Ramm about the way many of the new shows reflect a conflicted ­nation.

When Vuilleman left the series in 2015 she admitted in interviews that playing so many horror scenes had affected her emotionally. “I learned a lot from this series but it was a little hard, too, because by telling horrors over the years, you become a little permeable and this kind of permeability was quite exhausting,” she said, relieved to no longer be required to be strangled regularly. “So it got to me a little. I don’t know if I wasn’t more Chloe than Odile for a few years. The limits are no longer very clear.”

Well, Odile, c’etait genial tant que ca a dure. It was great while it lasted.

The Paris Murders is streaming on Foxtel On Demand and Binge.