The Returned (2015)

It's not a talky show; there's as much to be gleaned here in what is not said as what is. The moodiness of the production also goes a long way in helping us suspend our disbelief.

The final sequence in the premiere doesn’t quite work like it did in the original, and the small-town atmosphere of dread isn’t quite the same, but these are minor complaints for a surprisingly effective drama.

For those who haven’t seen the source material, this will be a fun, exciting journey, and you can be assured that you are in capable, firmly non-French, hands.

Cuse and Tucker (the latter also worked on True Blood) do a good job of translating the deeply unsettling miracle at the heart of this show.

Slow and mournful, The Returned is interesting but not, in the early going, enormously compelling.

The original French version of The Returned embraced spooky stillness, and the American version attempts to do this, too, but succeeds to a lesser extent. And while there’s at least a language barrier reason for remaking the French version of “The Returned”--unlike Fox’s “Gracepoint,” a remake of BBC America’s English-language “Broadchurch”--that’s still not enough creative justification for this identical, second version of the same show to exist.

[A] vastly inferior product, which lacks spark and purpose.