From "Widow’s Bay" to "Archive 81": this week’s TV series, featuring moral dilemmas, ghosts and former glories

Several generations ago, film buffs enjoyed playing “Last Year at Marienbad”. The rest of the world calls it Nim: sixteen identical pieces – matches work perfectly – arranged in four rows, decreasing from 7 to 1. The aim is to remove matches, provided they are in the same row and next to one another. The winner is the person who removes the last one. ‘Widow’s Bay’, boasting 14 Emmys, delves into ethical dilemmas instead. For example: a runaway tram is about to run over five people. By pulling a lever, it could run over just one. ‘Would you do it?’ asks Mayor Matthew Rhys to a local woman. “Widow’s Bay” – so named for its numerous accidents at sea – is a fictional island in the waters off New England. The genre? A mix of comedy and horror.

Summary of previous episodes: a highly successful series, with numerous remakes, which ran for four seasons. The glory days of the ASK agency are over; the agency has closed down – its rival, Starmedia, has poached all its clients. Andréa (Camille Cottin) is a screenwriter about to shoot her first film. And everything goes wrong. The actor Laurent Lafitte (playing himself) has put on a bit of a paunch and prefers Wes Anderson’s film. After a meeting with George Clooney – scuppered by the producer Noémie, who lambasts The Monument Men – Vincent Macaigne is cast in his place. Die-hard fans of the series will particularly enjoy this. Here, however, the abundance of stars only serves to highlight the modest screenplay.

Among the many series that artificially prolong their run – when the original concept has long since lost its edge, and sometimes even any semblance of coherence – Archive 81 was cancelled after its first series. No explanation was given by Netflix, now the master of our evenings. Dan Turner works as an archivist. It seems like the least adventurous job in the world. Even the ‘assignment’ seemed straightforward: cataloguing video cassettes used for a documentary filmed in the 1990s. But these are no ordinary recordings. They reveal mysteries – and not just one. We have the whole catalogue: esoteric cults, cosmic entities, alternative dimensions. The sort of material that draws in the audience – and adds mystery to the abrupt cancellation.

Someone must forgive them, because they know what they’re doing. We can blame those who draft the press releases, copying the material that accompanies the series’ release. Yet the same material then resurfaces as an article, a podcast, or a pedantic essay. It is a real crime to write that the series (compared to Stephen King’s novel and the 1976 film Carrie, directed by Brian De Palma) ‘explores the characters and their relationships by recounting the small decisions that will lead to that dramatic night’. These are offences that go unpunished on the internet – after all, what’s a new series compared to a classic film? They don’t even know who Sissy Spacek is. They’re unaware that films can be watched without a smartphone.