The most surprising thing about the ITV Maigret adaptations is Rowan Atkinson. Not because he is bad — he is very good — but because the casting seemed, on paper, like a provocation. Atkinson, whose face has spent decades in the service of comedy, now sits across from murderers and grieving widows with the patience and weight of a man who has seen too much of both.
It works. It works because Simenon's Maigret is not a detective in the Holmesian sense — not a reasoner, not a performer, not interested in spectacle. He is an absorber. He sits in rooms and listens and waits for things to settle into shape. Atkinson plays this with a stillness that is almost monastic. The comedy has been entirely evacuated. What remains is something unexpectedly moving.
The Paris of these films is a character in itself — grey, damp, period-specific without being precious about it. The cases are not puzzle-boxes. They are human tragedies with procedural frames. Maigret does not so much solve crimes as understand them — which is a different, and more interesting, thing.
For readers of Simenon, these adaptations are faithful in spirit if not always in letter. For everyone else, they are simply very good crime television, which is rarer than it should be.