3 out of 5

Created by: Stéphane Carrié, Alice Chegaray-Breugnot, and Nicolas Jean

covers seasons 1 – 3

Morgane Alvaro (Audrey Fleurot) is super smart, and helps the DIPJ police division in Lille, France help solve crimes.

Her brand of super smartness – being intellectually gifted; having a high IQ; and called being a ‘high potential intellectual’ or HPI in France – has resulted in Alvaro’s general personality prickliness, often making it hard to keep a job. She favors positions with little oversight, but can’t help her brain from always functioning in the background, absorbing info, and perhaps putting details automatically together at the inconvenience of others. It’s not inconvenient when she glances at a case board at the DIPJ during one night of her janitorial work there, and rearranges the info to solve the case, though the detectives – viewing the solve the next day – amount it to Alvaro derailing their work.

The uptight Adam Karadec (Mehdi Nebbou) is essentially ready to treat Morgane as a criminal; the dutiful Gilles (Bruno Sanches) finds her eccentricities somewhat charming; data analyst Daphné (Bérangère McNeese) doesn’t necessarily like the way Alvaro seems to be able to call up Google search in her brain; but chief Céline (Marie Denarnaud) sees the potential, and indulges Alvaro – can she explain how she solved the case? Cueing HPI’s theme music as Morgane free associates through little details and recalled tidbits involving weather patterns and architectural history and lays out all of the bits and pieces the detectives missed. Okay, good enough; can she go home now? But this is a perfect odd couple+ pairing for TV, and so Céline arranges for a deal whereby Alvaro can act as an ongoing consultant. While this ruffles Morgane’s anti-authority tendencies, a bigger paycheck for a single mom of three children helps, and she clearly gets some joy from actually helping others… thus establishing our odd couple+ premise where the flamboyant and quirky and rule-breaking Morgane pisses off her team, tramps all over the evidence, but solves the case anyway.

This is truly silly stuff, of course, but made fun by some balancing: Fleurot pitches the role quite perfectly as someone actually intolerable, but with degrees of innocence that make it charming; her Alvaro is obviously playing up her quirks as something of a defense, but it’s also true to her – she can’t stop her brain from going. The writers, at least initially, also step up to the plate by actually having her solve cases in quite unique fashions, and in ways that don’t make the other detectives bad at their jobs: they investigate, and do some of the gruntwork, and she takes a truly inconceivable stew of info and turns it into sense.

But then there’re the TV extras, which start out as acceptable background, but begin to distract from the more enjoyable procedural elements as we go along. Initially, this is about a mystery concerning Alvaro’s ex-husband. It resolves rather underwhelmingly, and while Fleurot and the actors around her are capable, editing and scripting shorthand really undermine this from having any weight. At least this seems like the writers taking the cue that such distractions aren’t necessary – seeing Alvaro ping off of the team and earn their trust and ire while we get our muder-per-episode popcorn TV is fantastic – except, no, we’re just clearing the way for an ongoing on-again / off-again between Morgane and Karadec that’s cute, except in how it reeks of Moonlighting-esque shark-jumping potential. Maintaining the needfulness of Morgane’s genius is also a tall order, as starting with the secondish season, the police force turn into cartoon characters – an incompetent chief; a data analyst who’s suddenly into horoscopes and make doomy prophesies – and Alvaro becomes glorified Google, spouting info that, really, doesn’t directly help unless the script forces it too, or are just factoids that other people in the room probably should know.

This ultimately nets out for quality distraction week by week, but the more convincing sleight of hand of the first season’s episodes is certainly lost, and HPI essentially becomes a French Castle.