Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Balthazar’ On Acorn TV, A French Procedural About A Brilliant Medical Examiner Haunted By His Wife’s Death

Why did you keep watching procedurals like Bones or The Mentalist for years on end? The weekly mysteries were OK, but the continuing arcs were better. But what really kept you tuning in was the chemistry between the leads on the show as they solved crimes together. Balthazar is a hit French series modeled after shows like we just mentioned. Read on for more…

BALTHAZAR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A man with his shirt off, showing a tattoo between his shoulders, wanders into his kitchen, cuts a piece of homemade bread and puts some homemade jam on it. He and his wife talk about memories around how her grandmother made the jam.

The Gist: What happens eventually is that Lise (Pauline Cheviller), the wife of forensic pathologist Raphaël Balthazar (Tomer Sisley) disappears from his view. So Lise is a ghost, or at least a figment of Balthazar’s imagination. He dashes out of the house to a crime scene.

At the scene, Inspector Jérôme Delgado (Yanig Samot) introduces Balthazar to Chief Inspector Hélène Bach (Hélène de Fougerolles), a very serious detective who recently transferred into the division. When she asks if he wants to see the bodies at this scene, Balthazar almost gleefully replies, “Yes. That would be more convenient for me to do my job.”

That’s Balthazar in a nutshell; he’s a genius, filling in the blanks investigators might miss. When he examines the two bodies at the crime scene, he concludes the public prosecutor’s wife was the intended target, and her husband just happened to stumble on the scene and paid for that bad timing with his life. But he’s also quirky, likes to overstep, and is insistent that what he thinks about a case is right. He insists that the murderer is about 5’8″, based on the angles of the wounds on both bodies, but Bach has a suspect that makes sense, but is just too tall. The key to the case becomes the couple’s daughter, who is catatonic since the murders. The doctor at the hospital thinks that the shock of seeing her parents murdered made her unresponsive, but Balthazar has other thoughts.

But in between, we see Balthazar drive like a maniac in his vintage roadster, eat rich foods, sleep with random women and talk about his exploits with extreme sports. Ever since he found Lise dead 13 years before, throat slashed and hands bound, he has been haunted by her presence as well as the presence of the people whose cases he does. They “talk” to him as he’s doing their autopsies. Lise lets him know that he should let her go… that is, until a body is found that has a mark that is similar to the one on Lise when she died.

Our Take: Balthazar is a big hit in France, where its first season originally aired a year ago. There’s a lot to like about it, namely the performances of Sisley and de Fougerolles; they’re playing archetypes from hundreds of procedurals that have aired in American and elsewhere for decades, but they give their own twists on those archetypes. Sisley plays Balthazar as just a little bit odd and a little bit inappropriate — he offers people chips as they’re watching a teenager being interrogated — but he is also burdened by not being able to use his gifts to solve his wife’s murder. Meanwhile, Bach also has a past, as she has kept to herself in the department since her transfer and not even her husband knows why.

As with most procedurals of this stripe — Acorn’s press materials compares the show to Castle, Bones and The Mentalist — the key to this show’s success will not lie in its week-to-week mysteries, though the less eye-rolling they are, the better it is for the show. No, the show’s success will depend on the chemistry between Sisley and de Fougerolles. And that seems to be pretty well established by the end of Balthazar‘s first episode. In fact, after their first case together is solved, Balthazar has Bach laughing in a way she hasn’t been able to do since she joined that division six months prior. That relationship is what made audiences tune in weekly to the the three American shows mentioned by Acorn, and that’s what gave each of them long network runs. Judging by the audience the show got in France, viewers have latched on to that relationship.

We do like the continuing arc of Balthazar agonizing over his wife’s death and his determination to sole it, along with other cases he hasn’t been able to solve. It adds a bit of character depth to the show. It’s a difficult balance for procedurals to let the arc develop in the background of its weekly mysteries, but the best ones of recent vintage, including The Mentalist, have been able to strike that balance. If the creators of Balthazar make sure to service the arc in each episode, it’ll make for a much more dynamic series.

Sex and Skin: The bodies on the show are rather graphically shown, eyes still open, and naked as Balthazar examines them in the morgue. There’s also a lot of close-up examinations of wounds, etc. But there was very little in the way of sexual heat; a random woman he picks up in a bar sneaks out of his apartment when she sees the crime scene photos he had on his coffee table.

Parting Shot: After seeing the mark on the thumb of a murder victim, Balthazar goes back to his apartment and pulls out his wife’s case file to confirm that it’s the same mark. “My killer is still out there,” the vision of Elise says to him. “Yes, and he’s done it again,” he replies.

Sleeper Star: Yanig Samot, who plays Delgado, complains about his cholesterol and thinks Balthazar is a little crazy. He’s a perfect second banana on one of these shows.

Most Pilot-y Line: Why TV cops insist on holding a suspect that doesn’t fit the physical evidence is beyond us. Probably because if they did listen to the ME, the episode would be over. Not saying this doesn’t happen in real life, but it feels like it’s SOP for TV cops.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Balthazar succeeds because of the chemistry between its leads, and that Balthazar himself is just weird and obnoxious enough to be likable.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Balthazar On Acorn TV