Lupin

George Kay's Lupin (the French Netflix series, distinct from the earlier French-language Lupin adaptations) launched on Netflix in January 2021 and was nominated for the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series and the Peabody Award. The series became Netflix France's most internationally exported original to date and consolidated Omar Sy, then forty-two, as one of the most internationally bankable French leading men of his generation.

Inspired by Maurice Leblanc's gentleman-thief Arsène Lupin novels (the early-twentieth-century French popular-fiction series whose protagonist had been a continuing French cultural reference for over a century) the series follows Assane Diop (Sy), a Parisian Senegalese-French man who uses the disguise, charm, and cunning techniques of the Lupin literary character to avenge his late father, a Senegalese immigrant valet who had been falsely framed for theft by the wealthy Pellegrini family in the 1990s. The series follows Assane's continuing campaign across multiple seasons of escalating heists, identity changes and family-history reconstructions.

The series's structural commitment to letting Sy's central performance carry the show (almost every scene includes him, whether in disguise or in his nominal identity) and to a sustained register of French-Parisian heist-cinema craft (the Louvre sequences, the high-end-fashion costuming, the period flashback chapters) produced one of the most internationally accessible recent French productions. Ludivine Sagnier and Antoine Gouy anchor the substantial supporting cast.