The Frozen Dead

This French series kept coming up on my Netflix recommendations; but I didn't take notice because I thought I had already seen it. I was confusing it with season 2 of Witnesses, another French drama, which had the English subtitle A Frozen Death when it was shown on BBC4.

The Frozen Dead is based on a novel of the same name by Bernard Minier.

It is only 6 parts, but I really enjoyed it. Mainly because it was similar enough to the Scandi-Noir  thrillers that I love to be familiar; and different enough to have its own intrigue.

I am not going to give away too much here. But one thing that becomes obvious very quickly is that the police are not in control of the situation at all. There are several players manipulating them and pushing their own agendas. In that sense it is very different from your run-of-the-mill crime drama where something happens and then the hero cop solves it.

In fact the hero-cop is a total mess here. As are most of the characters...

And it turns out that, unlike in A Frozen Death, The Frozen Dead doesn't have any frozen dead people. Sure it is pretty cold in that part of France... but the title is a metaphor. Possibly for multiple things, like being unable to move on when missing presumed-dead loved ones cannot be found... and other things that I wont mention as it might spoil the plot.

I would recommend watching this in the original French with subtitles (assuming you don't understand French) rather than going with the dubbed version. Initially I felt like being lazy, but the English dubbing is very flat so I quickly reverted to the French.

I wish the Netflix player on AppleTV had a setting like "Original Language with English subtitles". Instead I seem to have to select the subtitle language and then select the audio language... which then persists. So I ended up watching part of a Jessica Jones episode dubbed into French!