Unidad 42

I am on the third episode, and I feel I should be enjoying this more than I am. It has so much going for it. Patrick Ridremont was terrific in En Immersion and La Foret and is good again here; and sometimes it is welcome to have an anthology series, which I sometimes like to watch after watching 8 or 10 episode serials with a demanding, continuous story arc. It has good, edgy storylines; it has well-written dialogue (I have enough French to be able to understand a lot of it in the original with subtitles helping me along with the rest). The problem, for me, is with the editing. During Episode 1, I replayed a 10-minute segment I had just watched, and the longest any single shot was held was 6 seconds - most of the cuts came much more quickly than that. There is therefore a relentlessly manic quality in the way the final product is put together. I think this is possibly intended to mirror in some way the contemporary, unstable, high-tech, high-speed world that the investigators work in, but, for me, it makes it quite hard to watch and retain concentration