I enjoy foreign films; I don’t mind reading even when they are dubbed. I prefer to hear the actors’ voices. I often turn off the English dubbed voices; too often, they don’t sound natural or like they belong in the movie. While France may have disappointed me with the fourth-place finish in the World Cup, their movies often don’t.
Two terrific French television series are waiting for us. Unfortunately, the actors insist on speaking French.
I have discovered another threat to the American way of life.
Subtitles.
Apparently, it is no longer enough to ask Americans to sit on a couch and watch television.
Now they expect us to read at the same time.
The French have gone too far.
Which is unfortunate, because Americans who refuse to watch anything with subtitles are cheating themselves out of some damn good television.
Let me give you two examples:
Alex Hugo and Carpe Diem.
Both are French.
Both star Samuel Le Bihan.
And after watching both, you may have trouble believing it is the same man.
In Alex Hugo, Le Bihan plays a former Marseille police officer who has had enough of the city’s violence and escapes to the French Alps, where he becomes a rural policeman.
Naturally, people keep getting murdered.
Otherwise, the French would have produced a television series about a large quiet man taking long walks through some of the most beautiful mountains in Europe.
Frankly, I might watch that too.
The episodes are about 90 minutes long and play almost like individual movies. France Télévisions describes Hugo as a former major Marseille cop who abandoned the city because he could no longer tolerate its violence and wanted freedom in the mountains. The series has now produced more than 30 episodes and was still airing new ones in 2026.
But the murders aren’t the only reason to watch.
The mountains are practically another member of the cast.
The stories take their time.
People talk.
People think.
Sometimes nobody says anything at all.
Apparently, nobody told French television producers that something has to explode every 45 seconds or Americans might reach for their phones.
And Alex Hugo himself is different from the television cops we are accustomed to.
He watches.
He listens.
He thinks.
There is a sadness about him that never completely disappears. You get the feeling he did not go into those mountains merely to get away from Marseille.
He was trying to get away from something inside himself.
Then take Samuel Le Bihan out of the mountains and put him in Nice.
Suddenly the man smiles.
Welcome to Carpe Diem.
Le Bihan plays Tom Villeneuve, who has just emerged from prison after serving 17 years for murdering his wife—a crime he did not commit.
While imprisoned, Tom studied law. Once free, he becomes an attorney and begins defending people he believes have been wrongly accused, while trying to discover who actually murdered his wife.
The original idea for the six-episode series came from Le Bihan himself.
That sounds like the setup for one very angry man.
Instead, Tom is funny.
Relaxed.
Unconventional.
Sometimes infuriating.
Someone stole 17 years of his life, and his response is contained in the title:
Carpe Diem.
Seize the day.
If somebody stole that much life from you, perhaps every day afterward becomes too valuable to waste being miserable.
That makes Carpe Diem much lighter than Alex Hugo, although underneath the humor sits the mystery that destroyed Tom’s life.
And the French know how to leave you hanging.
I won’t give away the entire ending, but here comes a small spoiler.
By the final episode, Tom believes he is finally getting close to understanding what happened to his wife.
Then comes one last telephone call.
Tom looks across the room at his wife’s father.
And suddenly the man sitting there with the family does not look quite the same anymore.
The final scene leaves a very unpleasant question hanging in the air about what the father knew—and what he may still be willing to do to keep his secrets buried.
Then the screen goes dark.
That’s it.
Six episodes.
Good night.
Now the French owe me another season.
And here is the best part.
Americans can watch both shows.
PBS carries Carpe Diem through Walter Presents, in French with English subtitles. Alex Hugo is also on PBS, although PBS calls it The Mountain Detective. It too is presented in French with English subtitles.
There is that terrible problem again.
You have to read.
I realize this may place an unbearable intellectual burden upon a country whose citizens can stare at a cellphone for three hours without suffering permanent injury.
We will read Facebook.
We will read text messages.
We will read somebody’s 47-comment argument with a complete stranger about something neither one understands.
We will scroll endlessly through social media.
But put two lines of English underneath a beautiful French mountain and suddenly:
“I don’t want to read a movie.”
You’re not reading a movie.
You’re reading a sentence.
And while you read it, you get something dubbing can never quite reproduce.
You hear the actor’s real voice.
The anger.
The hesitation.
The humor.
The rhythm of another language.
You don’t have to understand French.
Read the English.
Listen to the French.
After a while, something strange happens.
You forget you’re reading.
Foreign television also reminds us of something Americans occasionally forget.
We do not have a monopoly on storytelling.
Not every detective has to work in New York or Los Angeles.
Not every lawyer has to practice in Chicago.
Not every murder victim has to be discovered by somebody wearing an FBI windbreaker.
Sometimes the body is halfway up a mountain in the French Alps.
Sometimes the lawyer chasing a murderer is walking along the Mediterranean in Nice.
And sometimes television is better precisely because it does not feel like the television we have watched a thousand times before.
I don’t recommend Alex Hugo and Carpe Diem because they are French.
I recommend them because they are good.
The acting is good.
The characters are worth spending time with.
The scenery is magnificent.
The stories assume the audience possesses an attention span.
And Samuel Le Bihan manages to create two men so different that you may have to remind yourself you are watching the same actor.
So give them a try.
Yes, you will have to read.
Don’t panic.
There will not be a test afterward.
And you might discover that while Americans were complaining about subtitles, the rest of the world kept making some damn good television.