The trick to enjoying the latest incarnations of great British TV detectives? Pretend they’re entirely new characters

By Bobby Ghosh

My wife and I invented a game while watching the first season of the new Maigret, which returned last week on PBS. Whenever anyone on-screen addressed the young, tousle-haired chief inspector by name, one of us would shout “Munier!” By the end of the second episode, we had persuaded ourselves that this was the lead character’s name, and it allowed us to stop comparing the show to every previous series centered on Georges Simenon’s high-toned and self-possessed Parisian chief inspector.

The game is not as childish as it sounds. It is a coping mechanism for a distressing trend you READ ON