ANTIGONE 34. Made-for-TV mini-series; 6 x 60m episodes. Mascaret Films-France Télévision, France 2, 2012. Anne Le Nen, Claire Borotra, Bruno Todeschini, Aubert Fenoy, Hammou Graïa, Lionel Erdogan, Bruno López, Fred Tournaire. Creators: Alexis Nolent & Brice Homs. Directors: Louis-Pascal Couvelaire & Roger Simonsz (3 episodes each).

   Perhaps because this well-filmed mini-series originated in France and not this country, you can find a lot of false and misleading information about it on the Internet.

   I hope that in my comments that follow I don’t say anything more that isn’t true, but IMDB, for example, says there are four episodes, whereas there really are six. Some sites spell the name of the main character, police detective Léa Hippolyte (Anne Le Nen), incorrectly.

   Nor is Antigone 34 a newly created task force to fight crime, as some sites say. It’s an ordinary police station in Montpellier, a mid-sized town in southern France on the Mediterranean Sea, but as such it still manages to have its hands full of murders to solve as well as the usual thefts, felonies and misdemeanors that plague every city in every part of the world.

   At least one review calls the series nothing more than an American police procedural transported to its French locale. I think if you watched only the first episode you might get that idea. A young female medical student is murdered, then another. The police think at first it was a hazing session gone bad, then a drug deal gone sour (a corpse being dissected in the college is found to have a package of white powder inside him), before coming back to a Castle type twist at the end.

   But wait. It’s not the end at all, but only the beginning. A scene that follows suggests that there’s more to the story, and indeed there is. The six episodes constitute one long story line, punctuated by single stories along the way: a missing video game designer, a hit-and-run driver with a fake ID, a robbery at a tuna warehouse, a pizza delivery hit man, and a plastic surgery gone bad.

   Each of these individual cases are somehow connected, however, with Léa Hippolyte at the center of whatever larger intrigue is occurring in Montpellier, usually a bright and sunny town, but darker elements exist seemingly with every twist of the tale, including, Léa suspects, within the police force itself.

   Assisting her are a Hélène de Soyère, a newly hired police psychologist, and Victor Carlier, a doctor newly out of prison whose daughter was the first victim in episode one, a case thought to be closed, but he does not think so. The psychologist’s first duty, by the way, is to clear Léa for duty again, after her previous partner committed suicide. She’s fine; other members of the police force still seem to have problems with it.

   The setting is often gorgeous, especially along the shore, but on occasion the story also heads off to some inner parts of the city and places where you and I might not care to find ourselves in at night. The series is shot almost continually with handheld cameras, even while listening in on ordinary conversations, then with fast action camera movements while making scene shifts.

   Because perhaps the series was filmed in French, even with subtitles I felt I missed sizable chunks of the story. Not enough to cause me worry or pain, you understand, but I do think there were some issues that were left unresolved, perhaps held over for a second series, of which there has been and will be none.

   The star attraction, however, as far as I was concerned, was the performance of Anne Le Nen, previously involved in fashion design and a student in the martial arts, particularly when it comes to self-defense for women. She was 41 when this series was made, a brunette with piercing blue eyes, a very athletic build and a beautifully expressive face showing resolve, anger, frustration and confidence in equal proportion. It’s too bad there was no follow up to this series. As I sad, she is the star attraction. All eyes are on her whenever she’s in a scene.