--- title: "Spiral" year: 2005 kind: "series" canonical: "https://film.one/tv/spiral" fi1m_score: 86 critics_reviews: 3 published: "2026-09-17T14:15:21.850160+00:00" updated: "2026-09-17T14:15:32.829061+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Spiral (2005) Created by Alexandra Clert, Guy-Patrick Sainderichin · 48m · Action & Adventure, Crime, Drama, Mystery **Fi1m score: 86** · Critics: 3 of 6 reviews so far *In a sentence:* Everyone in this Paris is bending the law, and only the lawyers do it in nice shoes > Eight series of French police and courtroom drama, and it earns nearly all of them. Caroline Proust’s Laure Berthaud is one of the great television detectives; the plots knot too tightly and the first run is stiff, but start anyway. ## Synopsis Paris. A young woman’s body is found in a rubbish container, her face beaten beyond recognition. Captain Laure Berthaud (Caroline Proust) and her squad, with Gilles “Gilou” Escoffier (Thierry Godard) and Frédéric “Tintin” Fromentin (Fred Bianconi), take the case. On the legal side are Pierre Clément (Grégory Fitoussi), a prosecutor new to the office, and François Roban (Philippe Duclos), the investigating judge who decides what the police may do. Watching them all is Joséphine Karlsson (Audrey Fleurot), a lawyer who takes any client who pays. Berthaud wants a result; the dead woman has friends in expensive places, and the machine of French justice begins to grind. ## Review The French title is *Engrenages*, which means gears, or cogs, and that is the idea. Guy-Patrick Sainderichin and Alexandra Clert built a series in which the police, the prosecutor’s office, the investigating judge and the defence bar are all wheels in the same machine, and every wheel is a little worn. It was first shown on 13 December 2005 and ran to eight series and 86 episodes, ending in 2020. This is a very good series. We recommend it with one caveat, which is that it takes a while to become itself. Caroline Proust’s Laure Berthaud is the reason it lasted. She runs a small squad out of a commissariat that looks as if the paint was chosen to hide stains, and she runs it on cigarettes, no sleep and a conviction that the rules are for people who do not have to catch anyone. Proust plays her small and fast, with a walk like someone late for a train. She is a poor manager of her own life and the series never pretends otherwise, and that is why we kept watching: Berthaud is not admirable, she is necessary, and she knows the difference. Thierry Godard’s Gilou is her loyalest officer and her worst influence, a big, warm man with a habit he cannot hide from her for long. Fred Bianconi’s Tintin is the one who goes home to a family, and the series uses him to show what the other two have given up. The legal side is what makes it unusual. Philippe Duclos plays Judge François Roban, an investigating magistrate with the manner of a tired schoolmaster and the tenacity of a terrier. He is the moral centre and the series knows it; his scenes are quieter than anyone’s and we leaned forward for them. Grégory Fitoussi’s Pierre Clément is the young prosecutor whose ideals are tested from his first week. And Audrey Fleurot’s Joséphine Karlsson is the lawyer, red-haired, beautifully dressed, and prepared to defend anyone whose money is good. Fleurot plays her without asking for sympathy and gets it anyway, in flashes, when a client turns out to be worse than she is. Pascal Chaumeil and Philippe Triboit directed early episodes and set a look that the series kept: handheld camera, close on faces, a Paris of grey-green light, ring roads, estates and windowless offices. There is not a boulevard in sight. The music is sparse and mostly stays out of the way. What we were not prepared for was the bodies. The series opens on a corpse whose face has been destroyed, and the camera holds on it in the pathology lab while people talk over it about procedure. We were horrified, and we were meant to be; it is the series telling us that the people who do this work look at these things and then go to lunch. It earns its 18 certificate honestly. The flaws are real. Each run of episodes carries a main case, usually a body, and a set of political or judicial threads that cross it, and by the eighth episode the threads have knotted so tightly that we sometimes lost hold of who was blackmailing whom and why. The first series is the weakest: the acting has not settled, Clément’s idealism is written too plainly, and the story of a dead woman with powerful friends is one the genre has told many times. Karlsson’s strand repeats itself across the years; she compromises, she suffers, she finds a new client. The cast turns over in the later runs, and while Tewfik Jallab’s Ali Amrani and Valentin Merlet’s Commissaire Beckriche settle in, the squad room is never quite the same. Most critics have compared it to [*The Wire*](https://film.one/tv/the-wire) (2002), and we see why: both are about institutions and both trust the viewer to keep up. But *Spiral* is closer to the old-fashioned police procedural than that comparison suggests. It has a body every series and it solves the case. What it adds is the French system itself, in which a judge investigates and the police answer to him, and the series treats that system as a character, slow, compromised and occasionally just. Watch it in order, forgive the first eight episodes their stiffness, and expect to be angry at Berthaud roughly once an hour. That is the intended response. Forty-eight minutes an episode, and it does not waste many of them. *Fi1m score 86, published 17 September 2026.* ### Reviews we read (3) - **The Guardian** (90/100, inferred): The critic finds Spiral genius and a darker, shiftier French counterpart to The Wire. It is praised for its intelligent, subtle plotting, gruesome murders, complex and flawed characters, unpredictability, and compelling cliffhangers. [Read](https://www.theguardian.com/culture/tvandradioblog/2009/apr/14/spiral-wire-tv) - **Evening Standard**, Alastair McKay (80/100, inferred): The review calls Spiral brilliant, centering on police commander Laure Berthaud as a great, self-destructive character whose extreme dedication drives the gritty drug-dealing story amid moral compromises and rule-bending. [Read](https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/tvfilm/spiral-tv-review-crime-drama-a4265291.html) - **The Telegraph**, Ben Lawrence (80/100, inferred): The critic praises the series for creating a fully realized world of Parisian society with multi-layered plots and documentary-style scrutiny. The flawed but sympathetic regular characters, especially the police captain and legal figures, are highlighted as a strength. [Read](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/tv-and-radio-reviews/9858749/Spiral-State-of-Terror-episodes-1-and-2-BBC-Four-review.html) ## Details - **Created by:** Alexandra Clert, Guy-Patrick Sainderichin - **Creator:** Alexandra Clert, Guy-Patrick Sainderichin - **Director:** Pascal Chaumeil, Philippe Triboit - **Writer:** Erwan Augoyard - **Cast:** Caroline Proust as Laure Berthaud; Audrey Fleurot as Joséphine Karlsson; Philippe Duclos as François Roban; Thierry Godard as Gilles "Gilou" Escoffier; Grégory Fitoussi as Pierre Clément; Tewfik Jallab as Ali Amrani; Valentin Merlet as Commissaire Beckriche; Clara Bonnet as Lucie Bourdieu - **Runtime:** 48m - **Release (the US):** 13 December 2005 - **Genres:** Action & Adventure, Crime, Drama, Mystery - **Trailer:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4VvsbjleE0 ## Where to watch in the US - Amazon Prime Video: add-on - Apple TV: add-on, hd - The Roku Channel: add-on, hd - Amazon Prime Video: buy, hd *Checked 2026-09-17.* Also available in: CA, GB, IE, US. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country. ## Awards - BAFTA Television Awards 2016: Best International Programme (nominated) ## If you liked this - *The Wire* (2002): The Baltimore series everyone compares it to; institutions failing slowly, in detail. - *Forbrydelsen* (2007): Copenhagen, one murder per series, and a detective who cannot leave the office. - *Gomorrah* (2014): Naples from the criminals’ side, shot in the same unlovely light. - *Happy Valley* (2014): Sarah Lancashire’s sergeant is Berthaud’s Yorkshire cousin, with better paperwork. - *Le Bureau des Légendes* (2015): French intelligence as office work; patient, procedural, quietly gripping. --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/tv/spiral