'Maigret' on PBS takes a modern twist

A few things look different in adaptation of Georges Simenon’s detective novels.

- ROBERT LLOYD

Los Angeles Times photo illustration; Playground Entertainment and Masterpiece, Getty Images

“Maigret,” premiering Sunday on PBS, is the fourth British series (plus one failed pilot) to be titled “Maigret,” after its main character, Georges Simenon’s Paris-based police detective.

As Ive written here before, he’s my favorite fictional detective, both because the stories serve my Francophilia — they provide a virtual map of the city and beyond — and for his ordinariness as a middle-aged, middle-class, happily married man, who is thoughtful, kind, uncomfortable around the rich and sympathetic to the poor, including many who might be counted among the criminal class. You wouldn’t call him melancholy, but he feels the weight of the job, of his difficult superiors, of the wicked world. He’s an honest policeman who describes himself as a “functionnaire,” a civil servant, and whose belief in justice might sometimes lead him to letting a malefactor escape. And he likes his food, and he likes his drink.

That the new series, starring Benjamin Wainwright (“Belgravia: The Next Chapter”), is set in the present day is not unusual. With 75 novels and 28 stories published between 1931 and 1972, it’s impossible to locate the character in any specific time; most adaptions are set in the time in which they're filmed, but even the period adaptations don’t necessarily reflect the year of publication.