On December 17, 2025, at 9:10 PM, France 2 aired L’Amiral, a new episode of Capitaine Marleau directed by Josée Dayan, in the series created by Elsa Marpeau. Corinne Masiero investigates the death of Clara Santini, found lifeless by a lake in Savoie, while the community is torn between a social project and tourist ambitions. According to Toutelatele, this return, offered on a Wednesday, gathered 4.34 million viewers for 25.4% audience share.
A rescheduled programming, a character that doesn’t change
Changing the day is like altering a ritual. France 2 did it, yet without breaking the essence. Marleau returns with the same gentle strangeness, this mix of oblique comedy and underlying gravity that distinguishes her in the cohort of well-groomed investigations.
This return also says something about public service when it succeeds in its fiction. A series manages to unite without smoothing out. It succeeds in making jokes and unease coexist. Moreover, it speaks of the country without resorting to commentary. Marleau doesn’t look like a model heroine, and that’s precisely why she endures. She arrives out of sync and occupies the scene askew. Suddenly, the setting, the notables, and the well-ironed phrases lose their assurance.
From the first scenes, everything is there. She jokes to disarm and observes to strike accurately. Then, she talks too fast and then remains silent for a long time. Marleau doesn’t just collect clues; she cracks versions. She takes the detour to reach the point.
The Savoyard lake, a setting that accuses
The episode opens with a cold image. Clara Santini is found dead near the water, sometimes in a canoe according to summaries published before airing. The staging refuses the noise. It films the place like a witness who asked for nothing but knows everything.
Filming took place in Savoie from September 24, 2024 to October 11, 2024. Moreover, this is reflected in the way the episode gives the landscape its duration. Here, nature doesn’t embellish; it confines. The smoother the water appears, the more the community seems to hold its secrets with both hands.
This attention to the territory, Capitaine Marleau has cultivated since September 15, 2015. The crime doesn’t fall from the sky. It crosses ties, debts, reputations. It forces everyone to position themselves.
Solidarity against profitability, a very contemporary conflict
The dramatic heart of L’Amiral lies in a clear opposition. Clara, along with Gabin Vauthier, a naval officer nicknamed the Admiral and played by Jacques Bonnaffé, carried a project for a nautical base for underprivileged children. Opposite him, a showcase logic, one that wants to monetize the banks and sell the calm.
The script avoids the lesson. Everything goes through conversations, smiles that freeze, overly polite justifications. We quickly understand that the matter is not only criminal. It touches on the symbolic ownership of a place. Who decides. Who benefits. Who will be asked to remain silent.
Marleau acts as a revealer. She lets people talk, then waits for the detail that’s too much. In this theater of proximity, the truth is betrayed less by a confession than by a misplaced emotion.
Jacques Bonnaffé, and the art of being respectable
The title of the episode is an elegant decoy. The Admiral refers to a man, but also a posture. Bonnaffé plays this authority with an emerging fragility. The prestige reassures the village, thus threatens the investigation. Marleau looks at the man under the emblem, and the emblem under the man.
Clara forms a trio with Gabin and Jade, a teenager involved in thefts. Thus, the plot gradually shifts suspicion. It advances in the old-fashioned way, through contradictions, faces, half-truths that intertwine.
The regular partner, Bérot, played by Lorànt Deutsch, accentuates the rhythm. He recalls the procedure, Marleau seeks the flaw. Between the two, the episode finds its pace.
And then there’s this very Marleau pleasure, that of guests who don’t just come for a spin. The series has always loved offering actors a ground where one can be respectable, troubled, then suddenly vulnerable. Bonnaffé, in particular, is not a prestige token. He brings a nuance of old France, a tired authority, and this fatigue becomes an indication as much as an emotion.
Corinne Masiero, a roughness that protects
Marleau has become a rendezvous because she resists standardization. Corinne Masiero gives her a gritty presence, a way of being in the world that refuses unnecessary politeness. Her humor is not a decoration; it’s a tactic.
In this episode of Capitaine Marleau, Masiero maintains a hint of melancholy, like a world-weariness. She jokes, but she doesn’t forget. It’s this nuance that prevents the formula from running empty, and that makes us listen as much to the way Marleau speaks as to what she discovers.
Marpeau, Dayan, Chavagnac, the making of a lasting success
The series owes much to its making. Elsa Marpeau has established a tone under which the investigation serves to observe people. Josée Dayan films speech as a duel, leaving the landscape the role of a silent witness. The production, notably carried by Gaspard de Chavagnac, maintains this identity of a rendezvous.
The pattern may seem familiar, but it works through music. We return for the friction of temperaments and for the language. Moreover, this way of making a crime drama becomes a social mirror without a slogan.
It’s also a matter of format. A new episode of Capitaine Marleau is approached like a TV movie, with its breaths and moments of comedy, its scenes in which a face is allowed to reflect, contradict itself, recover. This assumed slowness becomes a luxury. It gives air to the characters, thus weight to their secrets. It finally allows for a small implicit critique. It’s that of a country often preferring the appearance of harmony to the work of truth.
After the credits, the trace
The episode is available on france.tv, where other episodes of Capitaine Marleau can also be found in replay, and the replay invites us to revisit what we initially took for mere entertainment. The series lends itself to this second reading because it is not reduced to its solution. It holds to a character, a geography, a way of looking.
Ultimately, L’Amiral tells less of a murder than of an impossible sharing. A lake that everyone would like to own, a solidarity applauded as long as it costs nothing, a profitability invoked as evidence. Marleau comes to remind us that a community is also defined by what it accepts to lose. Behind the humor and the chapka, the series hits the mark.