Alexandra Clert's name is on one series that matters, and it ran for fifteen years. Spiral treats French justice as a machine, with the police, the prosecutor, the judge and the defence as worn cogs, and the picture is strong enough to survive a stiff first run.
Fi1m perspective
A case in Spiral does not belong to anyone. It passes from Laure Berthaud's squad to the prosecutor's office, to the investigating judge, to the defence bar, and each office does its job and hands it on, slightly the worse for wear. The French title is Engrenages, gears, and Alexandra Clert and Guy-Patrick Sainderichin built the series on that picture: four institutions turning against each other, every one of them a little worn. That is the idea, and it held for eight series and 86 episodes, from 13 December 2005 to 2020.
Clert had spent nine years as a criminal lawyer at the Paris bar before she began writing for television, and it shows in where she put the camera. Most police drama stops at the cell door. Spiral follows the file into the rooms where deals are done and paperwork goes astray, and treats the prosecutor and the judge as people with careers to protect rather than as furniture for the detectives. Caroline Proust's Berthaud is one of the great television detectives, and the series still never lets her win outright, because somebody further along the corridor always has a say.
Our reservations about Spiral are reservations about the machine as first built. The first run is stiff; the pieces are all in place and none of them yet moves easily. The plots knot too tightly, which is what happens when four institutions each need a strand of their own. And the series became itself in later years under Anne Landois, who ran it as showrunner for several seasons, so the credit for its best stretches is shared. What is Clert's is the shape of the thing, and the shape is what got us. Somewhere in the first series we stopped caring who had done the murder and started caring which office would drop the ball, and we do not remember another police series doing that to us.
Since Spiral she has written episodes for other French police series, Capitaine Marleau (2018) among them, and moved into producing, on Mongeville and on Le Vent des Sables (2024). We have not reviewed those and will not judge them here. The honest position is that she is a writer with one substantial credit, and that the credit is a good one and a lasting one. If there is a second machine in her, we would like to see it.
Biography
Alexandra Clert is a French writer and producer. She created the long-running crime series Spiral (also known as Engrenages), which aired on Canal+ from 2005 to 2020.
Before entering television, Clert practised as a criminal lawyer at the Paris bar. She has written episodes for series including Capitaine Marleau and Family Business, and has worked as a producer on Mongeville and other projects.
