Liaison review: What's French for bad TV?

Liaison, the first ever French-English series for AppleTV+, is penned by French writer and showrunner Virginie Brac and directed by Stephen Hopkins, who also helmed the first season of 24. It’s a political thriller, with lots of espionage, fighting, chases, guns, explosions, and a major focus on hacking, which means tense close-ups of password-entry boxes and code scrolling across computer screens like everything runs on Windows 98. This show also has actors credibly switching from French to English to Arabic as locations demand, which is impressive and definitely better than having French characters speak English with a French (or worse, British) accent. Then again, this series also has lines like, “Go through that door and this last week will feel like a health spa,” and, “WHERE ARE THE HACKERS?” If you like that dialogue, and you enjoy a quick pace and you prefer motifs, plot twists, and stakes that feel, well, familiar, then this could be a very good show for you.

Liaison’s main focus is on two former lovers, Gabriel Delage (Vincent Cassel) and Alison Rowdy (Eva Green), who have to face their shared past to save some nice hackers and stop some bad ones. Gabriel is a cool, French private contractor spy guy who loves to put on glasses, a construction vest, or even just a beanie, and blend into all kinds of situations. Alison … gets a lot of calls from her boss, a British Minister (they never say of what) named Richard Banks (Peter Mullan). She goes to important meetings, too, always dressed in black and sulking and/or smirking around. We find out in a later episode that she is Banks’ “personal secretary” after hours of wondering, what IS her job? We also discover that she got that gig through her dad, who was a big important NATO person who is now retired and lives in a castle.

There is exactly one woman in this show who did not land her position through her father or a lover, an advisor to the French president, and even she says of herself, “the president doesn’t like me. I’m a woman.” Boo! Most of the women characters are called a bitch or some other derogatory term more than once throughout the series. Meanwhile, every man is explained as having gotten to where he is by being either “a genius,” “a legend,” “a real pro,” “brilliant,” or “beyond reproach.” That’s why things always seem to work out for them, why Gabriel can punch someone in a two-minute elevator fight and magically lift the man’s Druze-star-shaped USB drive that looks like no thumb drive that has ever existed outside of this show. Anyway, with few exceptions, the men are all smart and brave, and we should just accept it without question, mmkay?