For all the talk about summer blossoming into a fertile field for quality television, the truth is you have to hunt a little harder to find the good stuff once the days get longer and the nights get warmer.
So here’s a place to look: Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET on PBS (check local listings), where you can watch an eight-episode, closed-end import detective thriller called The Tunnel: Sabotage.
Two detectives – world-weary Karl Roebuck (Stephen Dillane, top) and socially challenged Elise Wassermann (Clémence Poésy, top) – come back together to investigate the disappearance of a couple from their car in the Chunnel between France and England.
The man and woman are missing. Their traumatized young daughter can’t provide much information about what happened.
Almost simultaneously a plane crashes into the English Channel, killing everyone on board. Exactly how these two events might be related, if at all, constitutes the first challenge for our team.
Since these incidents happened between France and England, the British Karl and the French Clémence are assigned to work together on the case. It’s a reunion since they previously joined forces in the first Tunnel series that aired on PBS last summer.
Karl and Elise aren’t your standard cop team. He’s got a flock of kids and seems to be constantly threatening to leave this job, except we realize he loves it way too much ever to do that.
Elise has a brilliant and very literal mind, like an extreme version of Emily Deschanel’s title character on Bones. Elise doesn’t pick up on body language, nuance, irony, humor, sarcasm or other common communication devices.
When she’s asked by a friend what she’s doing these days, she says she has a boyfriend. The friend says that’s nice and also interesting since Elise doesn’t seem to be “the boyfriend type.”
Elise says, with no trace of humor, “I’m trying it out . . . Sometimes he talks when I don’t want him to.”
Elise’s direct TV ancestry comes from The Bridge, the Danish series that was adapted for the U.S. by FX. She’s the same determined and somewhat fragile character as the female detective in The Bridge, challenged every day by a world into which she can’t quite fit.
The Tunnel resembles The Bridge in several fundamental ways, mostly involving structure. In more ways, it takes its own path, and that’s to the good.
It’s largely a clutter-free detective story, in which the complex details almost all relate to the cases at hand.
We learn enough about the detectives, so they become flawed, sometimes annoying and increasingly interesting. Mainly we see them at work, painstakingly putting together hypotheses one factoid at a time.
The way the story is filmed, we know more about what happened than either detective, which adds further tension to their methodical search.
Dillane and Poésy handle their characters nicely, and the supporting cast uniformly falls in line.
In any case, The Tunnel: Sabotage isn’t designed as a star vehicle. The crime mystery gets top billing here, and the result is the sort of engaging story that provides a satisfying nightcap to a summer evening.