Não Há Segunda Chance

I can't believe PBS picked up this thing. The police alternate reliably between stupidity and cruelty. With a little effort from the writers this might have been ok. Instead it's almost laughably weak.

Not another kidnap[ing show, I thought. (MISSING, Season 1, was already harrowing.) Anyway, becuz it's French, I stayed on. Just finished Episode 2; and it does get better. The plot if more complicated and layered.

this is actually pretty exciting suspenseful tricky plot where you just have to feel for the mother's duress and heartbreak for loosing her small daughter and the hope to find her must keep you watching as well since the police is so incompetent and stupid that makes you want to give up on the show. I recommend you don't. I didn't because I ran out of something good to watch and I don't regret the time spent.

This decade, several good French-language series have been produced, with intense plots and twists, suspense and mystery moments, good character actors, etc. Having seen more than ten of them, it is natural that one becomes picky, starts to compare and find flaws or cliches not providing additional value. True, I really like the benchmark, how the events broke loose, pondering on and over the motives, but then, when a doctor took matters into her own hands, the number of unrealistic moments enhanced (e.g. regarding the police activities and attitudes), and later, particularly in the last episode, the amount of twists was too much, some scenes were not reasoned, and the solution how all was resolved reminded me more of the US series than European ones. As for the cast/characters, Alexandra Lamy as Alice Lambert and Hippolyte Girardot as Commandant Cyril Tessier outperform the others; besides, some characters were apparently included for political correctness (well, the source novel is written by an American anyway). All is all, not bad, but not in line with similar French series, e.g. Disparue, Engrenages, and others. And having seen the series, I find the title not too felicitous.

You get the idea about what kind of series 'No Second Chance' is going to be almost from the start: a woman is shot, her husband murdered, and his daughter kidnapped; yet almost at once the former is out of hospital trying to track down the latter, frequently in open defiance of the police. For good measure, everyone around her seems to be a suspect. It makes sense neither logically nor psychologically, and in consequence I found it hard to get involved with the story, which ultimately is proven to involve at least five perpetrators of at least semi-independent misdeeds. I quite liked the detective who reminded me of Mitterand; but for a serious French policier, watch 'Spiral' instead.