Georges Simenon was a prolific author who wrote a large number of novels featuring the French detective Jules Maigret. There have been many dramatic incarnations of this iconic character as this article discusses. About a year ago, I reviewed the 2016 British TV series Maigret starring Rowan Atkinson in the title role.. That series stayed close to the original in terms of period and the way that Maigret, his wife, and his supporting team were portrayed.

Now there is yet another version of the Maigret series, again called simply Maigret, that makes quite dramatic changes, while still keeping him as a chief inspector in Paris. For one thing it takes place in the present time so this Maigret has all the modern technology at his disposal. Maigret himself and his wife have been transformed from a sedate couple in their mid-fifties where the wife is a homemaker, to a hot young couple where his wife now works as a medical professional. Maigret’s team, all white men in the original, while retaining their old names, has also become younger and gender and ethnically diverse, with the addition of an insubordinate and insolent inspector who is jealous of Maigret and thus provides some internal tension within the team. The actor who plays Maigret, Benjamin Wainwright, has a disconcerting physical similarity to the actor who plays the annoying goofball Jonah Ryan in the comedy series Veep which I found a bit disconcerting at first, but that feeling soon passed.

Some features of the original are retained. Maigret and his wife are still a devoted childless couple and she still calls him by his last name. He still wears an overcoat. He still enjoys his alcohol and food, though not to excess. He is still cerebral, trying to understand and outthink the criminal while more physically active than in the original. He is still class conscious, feeling sympathy towards the poor even among the criminals while showing little appetite for dealing with crimes where the rich and powerful merely lose money. In the first story, he is angered when he is pressured by his superiors to abandon looking into the murder of a lowly burglar in order to solve a series of bank robberies, asking them why the mere loss of money by wealthy banks is more important than the death of a French citizen. While the original Maigret constantly smoked a pipe, the current Maigret carries around a pipe that belonged to his late father (not a detective) but does not smoke it. In flashbacks, we are shown his father smoking it. He still has an interfering prosecutor, sensitive to outside political and media pressure and always looking over Maigret’s shoulder and second-guessing him during his investigations, which seems to be a feature of the French judicial system.

One of the things that struck me while watching, and this also applies to other modern updatings of classic stories such as the Benedict Cumberbatch version of Sherlock Holmes, is that while the shows retain some of the features of the originals, one also loses the ambience that the authors created of the Paris and London of their time. In some ways, the new Maigret and Holmes could be any modern detectives, so why call them by those names? Of course, one advantage is instant name recognition. I am more likely to watch a new Maigret or Holmes story than one featuring a detective unknown to me. Another is that both Simenon and Doyle were prolific writers and provided many stories for the writers of these shows to work with. So one can understand the appeal to stay with the names and iconic characters.

I thought the new series was well done. There were three stories, each broken up into two 50-minute parts. This made for tight story-telling, providing enough time to flesh out the plot without dragging it out too long as some mini-series tend to do. The series is available online on PBS and I can recommend watching it.

Here’s the trailer.