NEW YORK TIMES, Monday, March 9, 2015, THE ARTS section, Front Page, Page C1, Television Review
and then please scroll down to
Philadelphia Inquirer, Tuesday, March 10, 2015, Page A3, STAFF REPORTS / PARANORMAL
Be careful what you wish for. That’s the message of “The Returned,” a spooky series that debuts on Monday on A&E about dead people who suddenly come back to life for no apparent reason and with no memory of having been absent.
The first episode introduces Camille (India Ennenga), a teenager who died in a school bus accident. Four years later, Camille saunters back into her house, opens the fridge, and makes herself a sandwich. Her mother (Tandi Wright), who had been lighting candles in Camille’s room only moments before, discovers her dead daughter alive in the kitchen, sulky as ever and evidently quite hungry.
This is a ghost story for grown-ups, focused less on the dead than the people who are suddenly confronted with lost loved ones years and even decades after they have died. When the impossible happens, parents, lovers and siblings experience rolling waves of shock, euphoria, suspicion and dread.
The A&E version is an American adaptation of a French series, “Les Revenants,” and it is in itself a creepy apparition: It’s almost identical to the original.
And while neither series is at all funny, the A&E one will be inadvertently amusing to anyone who has seen the original, which is available with subtitles on Netflix.
That was set in a small, isolated town in the French mountains. This one is a similarly woody mountain area in Washington State. Many of the actors resemble their French counterparts or at least share with them a certain continental je ne sais quoi. (Almost everyone is thin in Caldwell, Wash., and men and women dress with casual flair.)
The creators seem so scared of not living up to the French version that they have replicated “Les Revenants,” almost word for word and scene for scene, with the same characters, conversations and crises. Both shows are chillingly enigmatic, but the American one is more timid about it — afraid, perhaps, of the French one’s s shadow.
And one mark of originality on television these days is, oddly enough, unfaithful imitation. So many American shows are copies of foreign ones. The best adaptations riff a little, reimagining not just the setting but also the show’s sensibility.
“Homeland,” on Showtime, was adapted from the Israeli show, “Prisoners of War,” and refigured the American version around a new character, a bipolar C.I.A. analyst played by Claire Danes. “The Slap,” is an NBC version of an Australian series by the same name, but it surrounds the central conflict with typically American class rifts and tribal loyalties.
There are small differences in the first episode of “The Returned” and “Les Revenants,” but they are minor and seem to have more to do with expedience than creativity.
The French series was moody and almost maddeningly elliptical — things were not explained immediately, and plenty of things were never explained. “The Returned” gives viewers a few shortcuts.
In one scene, a young man who returns from the dead finds his former fiancée looking at herself in the mirror. In “Les Revenants,” the beautiful, dark-haired woman wore a cream-colored lace dress; viewers discovered only later that it was her wedding dress, the one she was about to wear to marry another man. In “The Returned,” the beautiful, dark-haired woman (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is in a black dress and she is placing a frilly white wisp of netting on the top of her head — there is no mistaking it for anything other than a bridal veil.
Some of the changes merely reflect cultural differences. In the French version, a doctor makes house calls and takes a public bus to get to her patient’s house, two things that are almost unheard-of in the United States. In the American version, the doctor drives to work and sees patients in a clinic.
But despite those accommodations to the American way of life, the creators seem intent on recreating as much of the original’s atmosphere and style. In the French version, Simon is a sensitive, pale young man with dark curls who dresses in a black suit and a white shirt like a 19th-century Romantic poet — or the writer Bernard-Henri Lévy. The American Simon (Mat Vairo) looks exactly like him.
Possibly because it works so hard to mimic the original’s gloomy restraint, “The Returned” feels strained. It’s not at all like “Resurrection,” an ABC series that also presented dead people who return to their old lives, only to turn those of their relatives and friends upside down. (The ABC show was based on a novel, “The Returned,” that was not the source for “Les Revenants” or its American adaptation.) That show has so far lasted two seasons and was as brash, colorful and loud as any network drama, a nighttime soap with lots of dramatic music and end-of-episode twists that nevertheless lost traction.
“The Returned” is much more cool, cerebral and unsettling, but it is at best a ghostly reflection of “Les Revenants.”
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