From the golden age of Canal+ spy thrillers to the French Netflix hits that have travelled the world: ten essential series from a television culture finally in full bloom.
French television spent decades in the shadow of French cinema. The Cahiers tradition treated the small screen as a junior medium, and for most of the 20th century the country's writers and directors put their ambition into features. That changed slowly through the 2000s and then decisively in the 2010s, when Canal+ began commissioning series that could stand on their own terms, among them Engrenages, Les Revenants and the show that defined the new French prestige register, Le Bureau des Légendes. By the middle of the decade the rest of the continent was watching French television closely.
The Netflix era took it further. Lupin became the most-watched non-English-language series in the platform's history when it launched in 2021. International co-productions (Marie Antoinette with the BBC, Drops of God with Apple TV+, ZeroZeroZero with Sky Italia and Amazon) have given French producers budgets the domestic market could never have supported on its own, and France now exports prestige drama on a scale comparable to Britain or Scandinavia.
The ten series below cover fifteen years of production, from the founding works of the Canal+ wave to the most recent Arte and Netflix premieres. Whether you're new to French television or filling in the gaps, these are the ten to watch.
1. The Bureau (2015)
Created by Éric Rochant · France · 5 seasons · 50 episodes
The most acclaimed French series of the modern era, and the one everything else on this list gets measured against, fairly or not. Éric Rochant's Canal+ production follows the DGSE's Bureau des Légendes, the directorate that runs France's deep-cover foreign intelligence officers. Mathieu Kassovitz plays Guillaume Debailly, codename Malotru, who comes back to Paris after six years undercover in Damascus and finds that he hasn't quite come back at all.
Serving intelligence officers have praised its tradecraft as the most plausible ever put on screen, but what really interests the show is the psychological cost of long-term clandestine work: an officer slowly losing track of where his real life is. Over fifty episodes the supporting cast (Florence Loiret-Caille, Sara Giraudeau, Jonathan Zaccaï, Mathieu Amalric in season five) builds one of the densest portraits of an institution in television. The Bureau is to French TV what The Wire is to American, a procedural so attentive to the texture of its world that it starts to feel like documentary.
2. Call My Agent (2015)
Created by Dominique Besnehard, Fanny Herrero · France · 4 seasons · 24 episodes
ASK, a small Paris talent agency, juggles capricious clients, office romances and the low-level panic of a business model under threat. Each episode brings in a real star (Cécile de France, Juliette Binoche, Isabelle Huppert, Monica Bellucci, Jean Dujardin, and Sigourney Weaver in the fourth season) to play a heightened and often very funny version of themselves, while the four agents (Camille Cottin, Thibault de Montalembert, Grégory Montel, Liliane Rovère) absorb the chaos.
Dominique Besnehard, a former agent himself, created it, and Fanny Herrero developed it across four seasons. It became the most successful French comedy export of the decade, picked up by Netflix and remade in Britain, Italy and India. The original is still the one to watch: warmer, more specific about the Parisian film industry, and more interested in its supporting characters than any of the remakes. It also gave Camille Cottin, as the abrasively brilliant agent Andréa, the role that made her an international star. It is the closest French television has come to 30 Rock, and a strong contender for the best European comedy of its decade.
3. Lupin (2021)
Created by George Kay, François Uzan · France · 3 parts · 17 episodes
Omar Sy plays Assane Diop, the Senegalese-born son of a Parisian chauffeur. Twenty-five years after a wealthy industrialist family framed his father for a theft, Assane sets out to avenge him, taking his methods from Maurice Leblanc's gentleman thief Arsène Lupin. Created by the British writer George Kay with the French screenwriter François Uzan, the show is a heist series, a Paris travelogue and a story about race and class in contemporary France, told in compact runs.
When it launched in January 2021, Lupin became the most-watched non-English-language series in Netflix history, reaching more than 70 million households in its first month and making Sy a star far beyond the French-speaking world. The locations (the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe, the Étretat cliffs of Leblanc's stories) gave it a postcard quality that travelled easily. Three parts have aired and a fourth is in production. No French television series has sold better abroad.
4. Spiral (2005)
Created by Alexandra Clert · France · 8 seasons · 86 episodes
Known in French as Engrenages, this Canal+ procedural is where the modern French television tradition begins. Alexandra Clert's series follows a Paris ensemble across three sides of the justice system: a homicide unit led by Captain Laure Berthaud (Caroline Proust), an examining magistrate (Philippe Duclos), and a defence lawyer (Audrey Fleurot) who moves between her clients and the police she once worked alongside. Each season takes one major case and lets it spread through all three institutions.
It ran for fifteen years and eight seasons, ending in 2020, a remarkable run for a European drama. Its influence on the French television that followed is hard to overstate. Half the writers now working in French prestige drama came through the Engrenages writers' room, and its insistence on procedural detail (real Paris courthouses, real police slang, real bureaucratic frustration) set the standard the Canal+ wave inherited. On BBC Four it became the longest-running foreign-language drama the channel ever aired. Anyone serious about French TV should start here.
5. The Returned (2012)
Created by Fabrice Gobert · France · 2 seasons · 16 episodes
In a remote Alpine town below a hydroelectric dam, several recently dead residents come home, apparently unaware that they have died and apparently unchanged since the night they were last seen. Fabrice Gobert's Canal+ series, adapted from the 2004 feature film Les Revenants, handles the premise with great restraint. It is less a horror show than a slow, melancholy study of grief, and of what it would really mean for a town to be visited by the people it has been mourning.
Patrick Blossier's cinematography, Mogwai's unsettling score and the performances (Anne Consigny, Clotilde Hesme, Frédéric Pierrot, Céline Sallette) made it one of the most influential European productions of the early 2010s. In 2013 it won the International Emmy for Best Drama Series, the first French series to take the prize, and it is often credited with persuading American and British networks to commission supernatural drama with the same patience and control of tone. An A&E remake followed but never came close to the original's atmosphere. Its two seasons and sixteen episodes add up to one of the great mood pieces in European television.
6. Marie Antoinette (2022)
Created by Deborah Davis · France / UK · 2 seasons · 16 episodes
Written by Deborah Davis (the screenwriter of The Favourite), this lavish Canal+/BBC period drama follows the Austrian archduchess Maria Antonia from her arrival at Versailles as a 14-year-old bride into her early years as a young queen learning the court's coded cruelties. Emilia Schüle plays the title role, with Louis Cunningham as the awkward, bookish Dauphin who would become Louis XVI.
The show cares less about the iconography of a doomed monarchy than about the daily machinery of an absolute court: the etiquette, the surveillance, and the calculated humiliations that could isolate a foreign queen. Davis brings the same arch, modern sensibility she brought to The Favourite, and the locations (it was shot at Vaux-le-Vicomte and at Versailles itself) give it an authority no studio set could. Two seasons aired between 2022 and 2025, and it ranks among the most accomplished European period dramas of the streaming era. France can do prestige history with the best of them.
7. Drops of God (2023)
Created by Quoc Dang Tran · France / Japan · 1 season · 8 episodes
A Franco-Japanese co-production for Apple TV+, adapted from the bestselling manga Kami no Shizuku. When her estranged father, a wine collector, dies, Camille Léger (Fleur Geffrier), a young Frenchwoman with no apparent palate, learns that his vast Tokyo cellar will go to whichever of two heirs wins a three-round tasting competition: herself or his Japanese protégé Issei Tomine (Tomohisa Yamashita).
The French screenwriter Quoc Dang Tran created it, and it moves between Tokyo and Burgundy with the patient attention to craft you find in the best food television. The wine is taken seriously (a Bordeaux sommelier was consulted on every scene), but the show is really about inheritance, what passes between fathers and children and between cultures. It won the International Emmy for Best Drama Series in 2024, the second French production to do so after The Returned, and is one of the most original European premieres of recent years.
8. ZeroZeroZero (2019)
Created by Stefano Sollima, Leonardo Fasoli, Mauricio Katz · Italy / France · 1 season · 8 episodes
An Italian-led epic, co-produced in France, that follows a single five-tonne cocaine shipment across three continents: from the Mexican cartel that produces it, through the American broker family (Andrea Riseborough, Dane DeHaan, Gabriel Byrne) that arranges its transport, to the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta clans who ordered it. Stefano Sollima, director of Suburra and Sicario: Day of the Soldado, brings a cinematic ambition rare in episodic television.
Canal+ co-produced it with Sky Italia and Amazon, with substantial French money and post-production behind it, and the French-language version was one of Canal+'s flagship premieres of 2020. Mogwai's unsettling score runs almost without a break beneath the action. Sollima insisted on real locations (Calabrian fishing villages, Mexican deserts, Senegalese ports), and they give the series a weight no green-screen production could match. Over eight episodes it makes a persuasive case that the cocaine trade is one of the central organising structures of the world today.
9. The Young Pope (2016)
Created by Paolo Sorrentino · Italy / France / Spain / UK · 1 season · 10 episodes
Paolo Sorrentino's Italian-led co-production, with substantial French backing from Canal+ alongside Sky Italia and HBO, casts Jude Law as Lenny Belardo, Pius XIII, the first American pope: an obscure outsider elected as a compromise when the conclave deadlocks. Diane Keaton plays the American nun who raised him in a Brooklyn orphanage and follows him to Rome as part of his personal staff.
It could only be Sorrentino: long Steadicam shots down Vatican corridors, an opening-credits sequence that became a meme and was also a serious essay on papal iconography, and a soundtrack that runs from Jimi Hendrix to LMFAO. Across ten episodes he uses the Vatican to ask the most basic theological questions about faith, authority and mercy, while the supporting cast (Silvio Orlando as the scheming Cardinal Voiello, James Cromwell, Cécile de France) makes up one of the strangest ensembles in prestige television. It is French only in the technical sense of its financing; in every other way it is a great Italian work.
10. Machine (2024)
Created by Fred Grivois, Thomas Bidegain · France · 1 season · 6 episodes
A slight young woman in a black hoodie gets off a train at a small provincial station in eastern France and walks into the local industrial estate looking for work on the factory floor. She gets the job. She is also a former special-forces operative trained in close-quarters combat, and as tensions inside the factory rise, Machine (Margot Bancilhon) is drawn into a fight between the union, the management and people from her own past.
Thomas Bidegain, Jacques Audiard's long-time co-writer on A Prophet and Rust and Bone, created it for Arte with the director Fred Grivois. Machine is one of the most original recent French series: a martial-arts action show with a serious political reading of French industrial decline over the past two decades. The fight choreography stands comparison with any current Hong Kong or Korean production, while the politics could only be French. Bancilhon carries it. Its six self-contained episodes show how confident French auteur television has become.
The French Tradition
Seen together, these ten series show how recent the French prestige tradition is. Engrenages began in 2005, but the rest of the list belongs to the past fifteen years, and most of it to the past decade. The machinery behind them (Canal+'s commissioning model, the Arte-ZDF co-production pipeline, streaming-era partnerships with the BBC, Apple, Netflix and Sky) has only just settled into place, and French television is finally working at the scale and ambition of French cinema.
The other thread is Paris. The Bureau, Call My Agent, Lupin and Spiral are all unmistakably Parisian, each a different portrait of the same city, from intelligence headquarters to talent-agency corridors to magistrates' chambers. French television, like French cinema, has always revolved around the capital, and the current generation has used that concentration to make a body of work that hangs together in a way few national television cultures manage.
Where to Start
If you're new to French television, The Bureau is the most ambitious way in and the one most likely to win over sceptics. Call My Agent is the most fun if you want something lighter, and Lupin the easiest of the recent hits. For something stranger and more atmospheric, nothing beats The Returned, and Machine is the most original recent release.
If you enjoyed this list, try our companion guides: 10 Must-Watch French Films, 10 Must-Watch French Crime Films and 10 Must-Watch European Crime Series.
