Stalk

I began to watch this series with distrust, but in the first moment it won me over. The best musical accompaniment with a convoluted plot, at the same time, the hack does not look like "keystrokes". As a programmer, I liked that the show is not like Hackers (1995), in which the data center is some kind of digital city.

I highly recommend it for viewing and rate it highly. Best music score I've heard.

The first episodes were quite good. I liked the characters, I liked the music and I liked the concept.

But it goes downhill really fast.

Most annoying for me was how wrong the hacking of computers and smartphones was displayed. At first I ignored it, because ... it is shown wrong in almost all movies and series. But it was getting more and more annoying in the later episodes.

And there are plotholes. A whole lot of plotholes.

Smartphones have no lights to show you, that your camera is on? Well they have since years. Okay, maybe they didn't when this show was filmed...

Everybody is holding their phones always in a way, that it can film their faces at all times, while being stalked.

Nice idea, badly executed.

I've seen both seasons over the past week. They are both rapidly fading from my memory so I thought it would be best to do a review while there are some vestigial remnants of the episodes left.

This is a teen drama aimed at the 21st century attention span. Episodes were a crisp 20 minutes long in Season One and twenty two to thirty minutes in Season Two.

Action was fast, characterisation and development non existent. I don't agree with criticisms that it didn't show the real world of hacking and cyberstalking with all of its setbacks and time-consuming failures before getting in to the target. It's a kids' show, for goodness sake!

Much of the dialogue was mumbo jumbo to me with its language of "applis" and how to stalk someone online. I speak fluent French but again, as in a recent French film I watched featuring the youth, I needed the subtitles to follow the script.

I turned my brain off and let this effort wash over me. Now that this review has been written, I can completely forget the lot.

This began as a quite addictive, impressive experience. I confess (no spoilers) that certain plot developments were not resolved satisfactorily.

At under half an hour, the episodes are well paced. Many of the cast are fine in their roles, and are no doubt popping up elsewhere, deservedly. The possible break out star might be Carmen Kassovitz.

However, the relationships were impossibly tumultuous, perhaps for the sake of drama. The initial portrayal of 'hazing' is, I hope not a representation of reality in French education, or of pitiless French youth. The hazing looked worse even than that at American colleges!

I understand that many consider the hacking shown to be 'unrealistic', which I can agree with, although TV from CSI, all the way back to Star Trek, has portrayed impossibly futuristic techniques, some of which became reality. One hopes that this range of everyday, normalised hacking remains mostly fictitious!

Finally, the dour lead character; quite believable as a 'tech nerd'; he bears a close resemblance to the Mr Bean character and actor Rowan Atkinson!

This french TV series deserves the highest rank. The quality of the plot beats easily any other of this kind. Actors are all at the very top. The protagonist is incredibly excellent, he commands the whole 2 seasons serie with a level unseen from Gossip Girl. I do think it's the top of teen, super high quality, tech-oriented, series. Gorgeous.