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In what will be the first fully-subtitled drama to air on the UK’s Channel 4 in 20 years, the net has acquired premiere broadcast rights to French supernatural series Les Revenants. Zodiak is handling international sales on the thriller that was produced by Haut et Court for Canal Plus and originally aired to record numbers last fall. The show, re-titled Rebound in the UK, centers on a 
group of people in a small Alpine village who find themselves in a state of confusion, trying to return to their homes. What they don’t yet know is that they’ve been dead for several years, and no one is expecting them back. Fabrice Gobert created the show based on the 2004 feature Les Revenants by Robin Campillo. Anne Consigny, Clotilde Hesme, Celine Sallette, Frederic Pierrot, Samir Guesmi and Guillaume Gouix star.
The UK is no stranger to subtitled fare – BBC Four airs such imported shows as Sweden’s Wallander, Denmark’s Borgen and Italy’s Inspector Montalbano. But the Rebound deal marks the second time in recent months that there’s been cross-Channel collaboration on a series. Sky Atlantic and Canal Plus started shooting last month on The Tunnel, the 10-part bilingual English-French adaptation of Scandinavian cop series The Bridge.
Les Revenants is also getting an English-language adaptation via Shameless creator Paul Abbott and his AbbottVision. In January, they announced a forthcoming project for the international market with FremantleMedia handling sales. In its original form, Les Revenants has been sold by Zodiak in Sweden (SVT), Netherlands (Just Bridge), Israel (Hot), Turkey (Sinema TV), New Zealand (Rialto), Hong-Kong (Now TV) and Hungary (Viasat). Advanced negotiations are underway in the U.S., Canada, Japan, Australia, Italy and Latin America.
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I’m excited to get to see this French original, I’ve loved some of the foreign-language fair that Sky Arts have been showing (including the original Israeli shows that begat In Treatment and Homeland).
But doesn’t this sound eerily like the premise for ABC’s pilot “The Returned”?
I’m a little surprised that the show is such a hit on foreign markets.
In France, Canal + is the main premium channel. It would be an equivalent of HBO, but even stronger, as it gets broadcast over the air in addition to cable and satellite and doesn’t have any major competitor. They have two or three hours of free daily programming that was viewed for a long time as edgy and innovative. Canal+ was the cash cow that allowed their mother house (a water distribution company) to evolve into Vivendi and buy Universal before their activity partly collapsed.
Basically, Canal + is mostly movies, with a few TV shows added. They’ve bought first broadcast rights for 24, Homeland, The Shield or Mad Men. And then, they branched out into original programming, with prestige shows.
The problem is that most of their stuff is high concept. The show just has to be different, not necessarily viable in the long run or fit for exportation. As for HBO, the TV show doesn’t need to be a big ratings hit, the priority is to bring subscribers and convey the idea that Canal + is still an edgy and hip network. It’s a pretext for an ad campaign and a few positive features in the media, mostly printed. Which is an easy task, because creation in French TV isn’t usually up to the US or British standards. So, as soon as there’s a prestige original show that airs, critics are a sucker for that.
In Les Revenants case, reviews were overall great for the early episodes. It was moody and different. Then, people who watched the show (not the critics who had screeners for the early episodes) started to complain, found that the plot moved at a snail pace and that some of the lead characters (most notably the gendarmes, cops in French rural areas) behaved totally unrealistically. At that point, some of the people lost hope that it would develop into something interesting and stopped watching the show, some of them stayed, partly for some hate watch. The big twists in the finale confused everybody and the overall feeling was that after the shocker debut, everything else had suffered from subpar writing.
So the new, *original* ABC series “The Returned” just happens to have the same exact premise and title?
Suuuuuuuure.
ABC = A Bad Copy
The Returned is actually based on a novel by Jason Mott that was published in summer 2012, just before Les Revenants started to air. It was likely a coincidence that the plots were so similar.