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 may have noticed: the great British TV detectives of yesteryear—Lynley, Dalgliesh, Van der Valk, Bergerac—revived and reimagined until they bear little or no resemblance to the characters you know and love. Treat the hero as an entirely new creation, and a perfectly watchable police drama climbs out from under the weight of expectations. It spares a lot of muttering at the television.