Maigret PBS Masterpiece season 1, episode 3 review

SPOILER ALERT: The following contains spoilers for Maigret Season 1, Episode 3.

The best part of Maigret is how the PBS Masterpiece series subverts the crime drama. Maigret‘s second story, “Maigret’s Failure,” is an even better example than the first. It takes a classic trope — the villainous businessman whom everybody wants dead — and finds a way to do something interesting with it.

The main character at the heart of “Maigret’s Failure,” Ferdinand Fumal, is as close to a live-action incarnation of The Simpsons‘ Mr. Burns as one might find. The episode does an excellent job of making Fumal loathesome, in all the expected ways. He’s terrible to his live-in staff; his very first scene is waking two of them up in the middle of the night. His wife tells Maigret the story of how he courted her just to help acquire her father’s business, and then decimated the business. And of course he’s nasty to Maigret, which is where Patrick Harbinson weaves in the second plot thread: the hero’s tragic past.

Every classic detective has some kind of tragic past; it’s part and parcel of the genre. But Harbinson’s approach to Maigret, and particularly how actor Benjamin Wainwright plays it, makes it worthwhile. The writing makes obvious why Maigret would have an emotional reaction and why that matters…