SPOILER ALERT: The following contains spoilers for Maigret Season 1, Episode 3.

The best part of Maigret is how the PBS Masterpiece series subverts the crime drama. Maigret‘s second story, “Maigret’s Failure,” is an even better example than the first. It takes a classic trope—the villainous businessman whom everybody wants dead—and finds a way to do something interesting with it.

The main character at the heart of “Maigret’s Failure,” Ferdinand Fumal, is as close to a live-action incarnation of The Simpsons‘ Mr. Burns as one might find. The episode does an excellent job of making Fumal loathesome, in all the expected ways. He’s terrible to his live-in staff; his very first scene is waking two of them up in the middle of the night. His wife tells Maigret the story of how he courted her just to help acquire her father’s business, and then decimated the business. And of course he’s nasty to Maigret, which is where Patrick Harbinson weaves in the second plot thread: the hero’s tragic past.

Every classic detective has some kind of tragic past; it’s part and parcel of the genre. But Harbinson’s approach to Maigret, and particularly how actor Benjamin Wainwright plays it, makes it worthwhile. The writing makes obvious why Maigret would have an emotional reaction and why that matters to the story. There are just enough scenes of angsting for the viewer to get the point. And Wainwright is great at making Maigret just a little different—enough to see and hear that he’s affected, but still maintaining Maigret’s calm demeanor. The only scene in which he lets loose is when Fumal uses Maigret’s first name repeatedly, which fans know that he dislikes. But that one scene is all the evidence a viewer needs.

Thus when Fumal is shot in his home at the end of the episode, the audience is completely on board. They feel their own ill will toward the character, as his litany of bad deeds has already been listed out and he’s on the bad side of their hero. Harbinson has created a second mystery where it feels like there’s no wrong answer. Viewers have seen plenty of other crime shows where a terrible person becomes the victim, but this one stands out because it combines the whodunit with the personal backstory to hook the viewer on multiple levels.

Another rewarding part of “Maigret’s Failure” is that Louise plays an active role in the other investigation, as the team searches for a missing social media investigator. It is an annoying trope in the genre that the hero’s wife or girlfriend exists largely for two reasons: to remind viewers that the detective has a personal life, or to somehow get pulled into a crime. (PBS viewers who watch a lot of Midsomer Murders will be reminded of Joyce Barnaby.) Harbinson treats Louise like the asset that she is, even though with her pregnancy revealed in the prior episode, he could just focus on that subplot. It’s a delight to see Wainwright and Stefanie Martini working as a team and their characters feeling like a real couple.

The social media story does get a little grating, between the victim’s increasingly out of touch parents and her army of already out of touch fans. Even conceding that the parents are worried about their daughter, they seem to be overly self-involved. Lapointe’s theory about Layla Lyonnet having staged her disappearance for publicity makes more sense when one sees her parents, who decide they need to film their interaction with police. They also manage her business, so is this all for the family’s benefit? But Maigret does explore the idea of how social media fame (and media in general, counting a nosy reporter) makes detective work more complicated. That’s an example of what a contemporary Maigret can do that its predecessors understandably couldn’t.

Maigret Season 1, Episode 3 may be ominously titled, but it doesn’t necessarily feel like there was a failure either. It ends with Maigret realizing there was a threat to Fumal’s life—but all the evidence pointed otherwise. It does give the audience additional perspective on who Maigret is and who he was, which is necessary as viewers move further into the series. The contrast of all the public attention versus the look at Maigret’s inner life works very well, and Wainwright continues to deliver an effective performance in the title role. What may be the character’s perceived failure is a successful follow-up to the series premiere.

Maigret airs Sundays at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on PBS. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Playground Entertainment and Masterpiece.

Article content is (c)2020-2026 Brittany Frederick and may not be excerpted or reproduced without express written permission by the author. Follow me on Twitter at @BFTVTwtr and on Instagram at @BFTVGram. For story pitches, contact me at tvbrittanyf@yahoo.com.