Deadly Tropics

The search goes on, for something watchable.  Ghosts, on CBS, streaming on Prime, is terrifically charming (and very light), and I’m not the only one to think so.  A wide circle of my friends, a group with widely divergent tastes, are smitten with it.  I’m also much taken with The Musketeers, although I aired some of my grievances in a Substack column a couple of weeks ago.  But more narrowly, looking in the genre of criminal enterprise, I’ve been toggling back and forth between BritBox, Acorn, and MHz – I only allow myself one subscription at a time.

Shetland is back, Season 9.  Blue Lights kind of lost me, in the second season, I don’t quite know why.  Scott & Bailey ran five years, and I wish there were more: I could watch Amelia Bullmore in damn near anything.  Troppo left me cold, even with Thomas Jane.  I took a flyer on The Jetty, because Jenna Coleman, how could you not?  (I was a huge fan of Victoria, which is admittedly a royal soap, but I thought it was more engaging than The Crown.)  The Jetty collapses of its own weight, as it telegraphs every beat of its glaringly familiar reveals.  Sorry. 

I’m pleased, therefore, to give you Deadly Tropics.  (Not a great title, and the original, Tropiques Criminels, isn’t any better; you wonder why imagination failed.  They could have called it Martinique Heat – almost anything would be better, to draw an initial audience.)  What the series very definitely is not, is a French knock-off of Death in Paradise, to which it’s been compared.  Just for openers, Tropics is nowhere near as annoying.  Paradise, which I’ve continued to watch faithfully (even through the ghastly Kris Marshall years), depends on a repetitive trope, and let’s be honest, fatigue sets in.  Deadly Tropics is much more of a policier, and strains credulity a lot less.  I could do without the exasperated male superior, mopping his brow and fretting that les femmes will embarrass him, but nothing’s perfect.  Baseline.  New commanding officer sent to Martinique from Paris to take over the homicide squad.  (Her former husband’s a bent cop, and she shouldn’t be tarred with his brush, but she is.)  Resistance from her ranking junior officer, also a woman, with radically different approach to policing.  Blah-blah.  New girl actually born on the island, but left as a child; has lots of family there, but doesn’t speak Creole, doesn’t really know the culture, although she herself is black.  The local woman cop - who, as it happens, is white - is a lot less structured in her methods, as relate to work, and her personal life.  This is mostly window-dressing, because the team manages fine, after some early missteps.

In other words, the show starts with a concept, and then essentially discards it.  There’s a genuine chemistry between the leads, Sonia Rolland and Béatrice de la Boulaye, and the scripts are spry and tight.  The scenery is lush, the locations feel authentic, the politics and so on seem to fit.  I don’t know from sex tourism, or the music scene, say, but it all has a gloss of reality.  As with Candice Renoir, the police procedures may or may not be exact, but you get a strong sense of the Caribbean, just as Candice gives you the Mediterranean influence.

The mysteries themselves aren’t taxing, but they’re not formula.  About half the time, you can guess it’s the dad, or the ex, or the plastic surgeon.  The storylines play fair, and they aren’t gimmicked.  I’ll settle for plain old GBH, and a garden-variety blunt instrument.

Joyeux Noël!