Here’s the problem. You’re French. You’ve nursed an idea based on a hip film you made a few years back. It’s been a struggle, but you finally get it commissioned as a TV show. Against all expectations — yours included — the thing is an unprecedented worldwide hit. The broadcaster comes back and says: “OK, make another one. Now. Oh, and here’s 36 questions from the first series that we think need answering in the second.”
“I’m not entirely sure they were the right questions,” says Caroline Benjo, the producer of The Returned — or Les Revenants — the artfully shot French zombie drama. “The main one was obvious — why are the dead returning? And why are the animals dying? The rest were quite existential.”
It wasn’t just Canal+, the French pay-TV network that first broadcast the show, that had questions. Les Revenants was aired in 90 countries; Sweden, Iceland, Australia and the US watched, and in some cases remade, the show. Over here, Channel 4 played it out in the Homeland slot on Sunday evenings, a first for a subtitled drama on a terrestrial channel. (The Nordic noirs, remember, often made their debuts on BBC4.) How did a weird tale of the dead coming back from the grave prove so popular?
“Our zombies are dangerous, not because they eat people, like American zombies, but because they cause pain and reawaken loss,” Benjo explains. “It’s a psychoanalytic approach — very Freudian. The things that are repressed return even stronger.”
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The Returned opened with a scene perfectly caught between baffling and heartbreaking. Camille, a teenage girl, barrels into her kitchen late one evening and starts rooting through the fridge for food. Her mother, disturbed by the noise, clings to the wall, weeping. Her daughter was killed in a road accident four years ago — yet has returned seemingly unharmed.
After a slow unfolding of various intertwined plots, the finale saw the undead marching on the townsfolk as they hid in a shelter owned by an end-of-days religious cult. Instead of clawing death, there was a long silence. In the morning, the town emerged to find the whole place flooded, the gendarmes dead and the Returned all disappeared.
Season two begins six months later, in winter. The characters are trapped in houses with no electricity, or wandering the woods in search of answers. The military are in town, mainly to understand why the water level at the local dam continues to fall. A new character starts to unpick a secret history of death cults and ritual murder. The dead are hiding in a cave.
“We were careful to avoid the authorities becoming too involved,” the show’s writer, Fabrice Gobert, says. “If we go to the Elysée and see François Hollande dealing with the problem, everybody will switch off the TV.
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“This may work in America, where the president can save the world, but it cannot work in France. Undead, yes. The president — absurd.”
The Returned embodies French values: Gobert and Benjo chat over an on-set lunch where cast and crew sit together for four courses with wine and cheese. At the same time, the team have had to engage with the new ways of TV fandom.
“I was surprised by the reaction on the internet — the people who tried to understand what happened and their theories,” Gobert confesses, shaking his head. “There is a scene where we have dead animals near the lake. People counted the number of dead animals because they thought it was important. In fact, there were seven dead animals because we couldn’t afford 10.”
The Returned has been a game-changer. “What’s significant about it isn’t just its style — something completely new to French TV,” says Walter Iuzzolino, creative director at the European drama broker Global Series Network. “It also marked the moment that subtitled European drama hit primetime across the world. Before then, subtitled shows were niche.”
This has had some surprising effects. Canal+ recently started hawking its new Louis XIV blockbuster, Versailles, around the world. With a budget of almost €30m, it was made for French TV, but must sell in at least 30 countries to secure the €10m needed to ensure the project isn’t financially catastrophic.
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Yet while sales of French TV programmes have been rising, the US — the world’s biggest TV market by a long, long way — has bought very few of them. American TV spent just €8.1m on French-made shows in 2013. To overcome this hurdle, the team behind Versailles is filming the show in… well, English. Critics are already in uproar.
Back on set in Annecy, Benjo is philosophical. “If we can’t compete, it isn’t a problem of money, it’s a problem of, maybe, ambition,” she argues. And will the 36 questions be answered? “We certainly intend to explore the reason for the comeback and for the evolution of dead people. We will understand Victor’s age and Adele becoming pregnant by her dead boyfriend, Simon — although there’s a mysterious quality to the answers that might...”
She trails off, gives a Gallic shrug. “Who knows? I can tell you for sure that it will all be unsettling.”
The Returned, More 4, Fri