Braquo: The Complete First Season

A gritty cop show with a Gallic accent (the title here is French slang for a bank robbery, but also means “crazy”), Olivier Marchal's series centers on a special police unit that not only skirts the rules in fighting crime but often breaks the law to protect its members. The narrative arc is tied to the suicide of the group's leader, whose brutal interrogation of a rape suspect brought the internal affairs department down on him with threats of dismissal. His four colleagues—Eddy (Jean-Hugues Anglade), Walter (Joseph Malerba), Théo (Nicolas Duvauchelle), and Roxane (Karole Rocher)—are determined to clear his name in order to secure a pension for his family, but after abducting the accuser to force him to recant, they accidentally kill the man. Thus begins a spiral of violence, twists, and double-crosses in which the unit has to deal not only with their hostile colleagues (a vile internal affairs investigator and a bunch of self-interested superiors) but also an assortment of criminal types, including a cunning man who is instrumental in springing a trap that serves as the season-ending cliffhanger. Braquo is a nasty, cynical show in which it's difficult to tell the good guys from the bad. But solid writing and acting make its quartet of anti-heroes a fascinating bunch, and their enemies are almost equally compelling in this series that ably captures the seediness of assorted Parisian locales. Compiling all eight episodes from the 2009 debut season, extras include a brief preview of the second season, which is also newly available on DVD. Recommended. (F. Swietek)