Airdate: Balthazar

French mystery Balthazar will premiere on Acorn TV on Monday.

The 2018 drama stars Tomer Sisley as a pathologist solving murders.

This screens in French with English Subtitles. Series 2 will follow on the premium streaming platform in March and Series 3 is set to land in April.

Compared favourably to such shows as Castle, The Mentalist and Bones, this acclaimed series was one of the 10 highest-rated dramas in France in 2018.

Popular actor, director and comic Tomer Sisley (Messiah, The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch, We’re the Millers) stars as Raphaël Balthazar, a handsome, intelligent and quick-witted forensic pathologist in Paris. Working on the investigations of violent murders, Balthazar can make the dead “speak” like no one else, but he is also irreverent, mischievous and lives his life in firm defiance of norms and conventions. This presents a major challenge for new, no-nonsense police commander HeìleÌne Bach (HeìleÌne de Fougerolles, Le Secret d’Elise, VA Savoir), who must collaborate with him on these complicated cases.

On the job, Balthazar is confident; his conclusions about the victims, their lifestyles and their deaths often accurately fill in gaps and, drawing from his top-notch skills and the latest technology, he helps uncover evidence that police missed on the crime scene. He becomes so personally invested in the victims’ back stories that he speaks with them while conducting their autopsies at the morgue and they interact in return. Balthazar is openly flirtatious with Bach, yet he is vulnerable at home where he still mourns – and draws comfort from intimate imagined conversations with – his late wife, Lise (Pauline Cheviller, Le Secret d’Elise), who was murdered 13 years earlier. Balthazar is now greatly conflicted over whether the man locked up for Lise’s murder was actually the perpetrator. Thanks to new clues, he is in hot pursuit to learn the true identity of her killer.

Monday 1 February on Acorn TV.