• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, June 23, 2023

The arrival of “Cannes Confidential” on Monday and the conclusion of the Cannes Lions ad biz extravaganza on Friday is purely coincidental.

Neither has anything in common with the other -- except their locales in the posh city on the French Riviera.

“Cannes Confidential” is a six-episode cop drama with sexy detectives played by Tamara Marthe as Detective Léa Robert (above photo, left) and Lucie Lucas as Detective Camille Delmasse (right). 

The show starts Monday on Acorn TV, the streaming service owned by AMC Networks. 

The show was filmed entirely in Cannes with a cast made up mostly of French actors and actresses. Fortunately, they are bilingual, and “Cannes Confidential” is in English.

In fact, this city known for its red carpets rolled one out for the producers of this show, according to Acorn. 

“ ‘Cannes Confidential’ had unprecedented access to film in the City of Cannes through an exclusive partnership and marks the first English-language procedural drama to be produced and set on the Cote d’Azur since the 1970s,” said a press release.

Let me take a wild guess. Hardly anybody who is reading this TV Blog (if there is anybody reading it) has ever given a moment’s thought to the possibility that Cannes, France has a police department at all.

Well, apparently it does. And this drama series about the CPD has nothing to do with international advertising awards or film festivals.

Indeed, it intentionally stays away from all that. “The series will introduce viewers to a rarely seen view of Cannes, beyond the yachts and A-listers, with its fishing boats, local tradesmen, and working-class characters,” the press release said.

Speaking of characters, one of them is a footloose Englishman who insinuates himself into the life of Detective Delmasse. He might even be a con man.

Get it? “Cannes” man? 

Here’s the basic premise: The detectives pick up the case of a murdered graffiti artist named the Jester, whose identity is known to no one but his sister, who is an art dealer.

Just minutes into this investigation, the Englishman turns up, and keeps turning up on the periphery of the case. 

His name is Harry, and Detective Delmasse is not wild about him. He is a pain in the neck who flirts with her shamelessly.

While this murder investigation is going on, and Harry (played by Jamie Bamber) works relentlessly to charm her, there is another storyline on Camille’s mind. Her father, who was once police chief of the CPD, is in jail awaiting trial on a long list of corruption charges. 

Not surprisingly, his daughter believes he is innocent, but she has yet to unearth any evidence that will prove it.

With its fierce female cop characters, its British-accented leading man and its multi-episode story arc, “Cannes Confidential” plays like any cop show that could have been made for CBS, NBC, ABC or Fox.

It is mainly an action show, even when the action is unnecessary. The best example of this in Episode One is the hot pursuit of a man who was beating up another man in a parking lot and in the process, elbowed Detective Robert hard in the face.

When he tried to get away in his fast SUV, Detective Delmasse and Harry jumped on his motorcycle to chase the man around mountainous hairpin turns.

The decision to embark on this high-speed chase, in which any of its participants could have been killed, was rash. Harry and Camille already knew who the guy was and where he was likely to be. They could just as easily have gone over there later to pick him up.

But on TV, as in life, logic is not necessarily to be expected in all situations. At such times, TV and life can both be entertaining anyway.

“Cannes Confidential” premieres on Monday (June 26) on Acorn TV.