Spiral

Alexandra Clert's Spiral (French: Engrenages) ran on Canal+ from December 2005 to December 2020 across eight series and eighty-six episodes, by some distance the longest continuous run of any French scripted television show of its era. The series was sold to BBC Four for the UK market, where it became one of the central anchors of the channel's Saturday-night foreign-language drama strand alongside The Killing, Borgen and The Bridge. It was nominated for the BAFTA for Best International Series.

Clert created the series as the first French show purpose-built around the country's investigative judiciary system, the juge d'instruction mechanism, distinct from Anglo-American police procedural structures, which French television had largely avoided dramatising in serialised form. The lead cast across the run includes Caroline Proust, Audrey Fleurot, Thierry Godard, Philippe Duclos and Grégory Fitoussi; Fleurot would go on to become one of the most recognisable French television actresses of her generation through HPI and the films of Olivier Marchal.

The production was shot largely on real Paris locations (courtrooms, police precincts, the streets around La Défense and Belleville) with a deliberately unglamorous documentary-influenced visual style. The show is regularly cited as the foundational entry point of contemporary French scripted exports, opening the way for the international success of The Bureau, Call My Agent!, Lupin and the Canal+ commissions of the late 2010s.