Netflix’s Highs and Lows: Dark and Marseille
A light rises over the horizon, illuminating all the land with its splendor, healing the sick, delivering the downtrodden, redeeming the sinners. I cannot help but bow before its majestic luminescence.
Yup, Netflix is expanding. The popular streaming service has been pushing aggressively into new terrain — snapping up popular shows like Black Mirror and announcing a content expansion into India, possibly the world’s largest untapped English-speaking market. And, of course, they’ve been trying to sway global audiences with increasing amounts of local content, much of it non-English, from different countries around the world. And, with an already-entrenched appreciation of good television, Europe was a good place to start commissioning big, new projects. Naturally, I decided I just had to review its two biggest reveals of the last few years: France’s Marseille, and Germany’s Dark.
Europe is a strange place because of its lack of consistency in television. Those of us who watch German television (a lonely group indeed) remember, with some confusion, the contrast between two of its global hits: the action-packed, fast-paced Cold War spy thriller Deutschland ’83 and the gritty WWII miniseries Generation War. As for France, hit shows have ranged from lavish historical dramas like Versailles to the cerebral spy series The Bureau. I’d hoped, when Netflix commissioned the shows, that each piece would be sui generis — a blend of American sensibility and European aesthetics, producing a beautiful (well, for those of us who find well-made TV beautiful) work of art.
This is why Marseille, Netflix’s first French original, disappoints. A political thriller starring the venerable Gérard Depardieu as the longtime mayor of Marseille and Benoît Magimel (known for La Haine and The Piano Teacher) as his backstabbing protégé, Marseille feels far too much like one of any number of American-produced shows. It’s been labelled a French House of Cards by reviewers from Vulture and Esquire, but it also tries to mesh together echoes from True Detective, gangster movies from the ’90s, and The Wire. The show blends motifs together until you aren’t quite sure what you’re watching; Depardieu’s protagonist is an awkward blend of Frank Underwood, Boardwalk Empire’s Nucky Thompson, and Scarface’s Tony Montana, while his treasonous deputy is more one-dimensional than a ’60s James Bond villain. The writing abandons House of Cards’ occasional effort at smooth, naturalistic dialogue, but retains all its stilted one-liners and clichés. Even as an imitation of American shows, Marseille falls flat; as an original contribution to the television landscape, it’s a disaster to rival The Borgias.
Unfortunately, this isn’t where Marseille’s shortcomings end. The show’s executive producer, Florent Siri, claimed that the most important character in the show was the city of Marseille — a beautiful port city with a rich history and diverse culture. Fertile material for a smart political show à la The Wire, right? It should be, and I wish it was, but the only nods to these aspects are brief scenes set throughout Marseille and the unconvincing assertion that the conflict between Depardieu’s and Magimel’s characters represents that between the new and old France.
This is where the show truly disappoints. It had potential — there are a few shining moments, and Depardieu’s garrulous, larger-than-life, cocaine-snorting, good-hearted mayor is a character I could get hooked on — but that potential is snuffed out in a stagnant pool of bad writing and worse characterization. Perhaps Marseille’s only saving grace, the excellent atmospherics of Alexandre Desplat’s score lets you tune out the terrible conversations, but not even great music can save this show. In a Europe that has produced world-class political dramas like Borgen, Marseille had so much to work with, yet falls flat in execution — and that is unforgivable.
To be fair, when you’re commissioning as many shows as Netflix is, you can’t expect to hit home every time. And when you do — when your show is tightly-written, well-made, and nuanced — you get a great show unlike any other: and that’s why the other big European Netflix show, Dark, excites me as much as Marseille doesn’t.
Dark is a vastly different show. Not just in contrast to Marseille, but to anything on television. Yes, the usual comparison is to Stranger Things (as the creators noted in a Radio Times interview), but they’re really only alike insofar as kids go missing in both pilot episodes. Better comparisons have been made to Twin Peaks, and I see traces of 2004’s sleeper hit movie Primer. It’s also a much harder show to watch than Marseille because of its attempt to interweave three timelines — taking place in 2019, 1986, and 1953 — through a time-travelling wormhole in the small German town of Minden.
We’ve seen attempts to do this sort of thing before; Cloud Atlas did so in a relatively simple alternating fashion, and Memento opted for a disorienting reverse-polarity that I’m still trying to figure out. Dark is interesting because it tries hard not to let the puzzle get in the way of the plot — science fiction is fundamentally about examining people, and Dark understands that. The show’s complex, layered narrative of lies and secrets in a small town is a standard trope that’s excellently executed. And when combined with its time-travelling shenanigans, the show is incredibly entertaining.
This is not to say Dark is perfect; the themes of truth, choice, and consequences are honestly a little heavy-handed, and that’s something I hope will be better managed in the next season. Some of the characters start out relatable and end up unlikeable. Though the pacing is generally good, the writing lags in places, and sometimes it feels like we’re killing time between plot twists. However, with a solid cast, excellent score, and creative camerawork, it is an addicting watch. Unlike Marseille, it truly does try to be original — some of its tropes are borrowed, of course, but the creative ways it blends them together are worth commendation.
Dark hits all the sweet spots Marseille failed to. That they were such different shows, though, actually might be a good thing. There’s never been as much television to watch as there is now. And with the constant challenge to creators to make something different, there’s never been as much variety as there is now; even Netflix, just one of many sources of great TV, has commissioned everything from Suburra, an Italian show examining Rome’s seedy underbelly, to Brazil’s 3%, a dystopian thriller. The most niche of tastes can find something to satisfy it, and even the existence of Marseille gives me hope that the explosion of local content all around the world will create a world where you can find absolutely anything you might want to watch.
Though if that does happen to be Marseille, well, to paraphrase its protagonist, “I will never, ever forgive you.”
