Police Captain César Wagner returns for a second season (I must confess to not recalling the first) of crime solving in the Strasbourg region of France. Wagner is a highly unusual policeman – he’s a nervous hypochondriac who seems more worried about catching Lyme Disease than the local criminal fraternity.
If you want to avoid all spoilers, stop reading this article now.
Wagner and his team are sent to Vosges, a mountainous and beautiful area near the German border, where a local animal welfare activist and photographer, Juliette Plessy, has been murdered in the woods. Wagner and co are drafted in because Plessy had had confrontations with the local police chief, and it was therefore thought better to bring in a new team than risk claims of a conflict of interest.
Alongside Wagner throughout is the engaging Élise Beaumont (Olivia Côte), the forensic scientist who accompanies him on his investigations – and on whom Wagner clearly has something of a crush!
Suspicion for Plessy’s death initially falls on the local hunters and landowners, who were at loggerheads with her and her animal rights activist group. But when a dead lynx – a predator in the local forests who often takes local livestock – turns up a few days later, seemingly sedated before stabbed to death, Wagner and his team realise that the animal’s sedation suggests it’s unlikely to be a local hunter.
And when it is discovered that the high-profile and social-media savvy Plessy was about to leave the welfare group, the team realise they need to look at the possibility of an inside job within the activist group.
This season comprises of just two episodes of 90 minutes each – individual stand-alone stories (the second one relates to the death of an actor whilst auditioning at Strasbourg’s national theatre) – each with a cast of suspicious, devious and peculiar individuals who all seem to have some secrets to hide.
This isn’t highbrow drama, as you can imagine. It’s like a comedic ‘Vera’ or ‘Midsomer Murders’. Wagner – hammed up to perfection by Gil Alma – is an interesting character, not dissimilar in his OCD ways to Ben Miller’s Professor T, although I wouldn’t put ‘The Wagner Method’ in quite the same league as the excellent ‘Professor T’.
The scenery – Vosges in this episode, but Strasbourg is equally lovely – is very easy on the eye, and everything is very cosy and warming and reassuringly concluded. The plot in this episode is somewhat absurd, but that doesn’t matter. It’s entertaining and a pleasant way to pass 90 minutes, trying to unravel the red herrings and work out who did it and why.
In these dark and miserable long winter evenings, I can think of little better than settling down to watch something like this, with its beautiful scenery and entertaining shenanigans. Give me this over some reality TV nonsense any day.
Walter Presents: ‘The Wagner Method’ Season 2 is available as a full boxset on C4 Streaming now.
