Credits: Tyseria / Wikimedia Commons — CC BY-SA 4.0.
On December 17, 2025, at 9:10 p.m., France 2 broadcast 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 dead by a lake in Savoie, while the town is torn between a social project and tourist ambitions. According to Toutelatele, this return, scheduled on a Wednesday, drew 4.34 million viewers for 25.4% audience share.
A Shifted Schedule, A Character Who Doesn’t Move
Changing the day touches a ritual. France 2 did it nonetheless, without breaking the essentials. Marleau returns with the same gentle strangeness, that blend of oblique comedy and underlying gravity that sets her apart in the crowd of neat investigations.
This return also says something about public broadcasting when it succeeds with its fiction. A series manages to unite people without smoothing out. It manages to make the joke and the unease coexist. Moreover, it speaks about the country without resorting to commentary. Marleau doesn’t look like a model heroine; that’s precisely why she holds. She arrives offbeat and occupies the scene at an angle. Suddenly, the setting, the notables, and the well-ironed lines lose their assurance.
From the first scenes, everything is there. She jokes to disarm and watches to strike true. Then she talks too fast and stays 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 on a cold image. Clara Santini is found dead near the water, sometimes in a canoe according to summaries published before airing. The staging refuses 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 how the episode grants the landscape its duration. Here, nature doesn’t beautify, it imprisons. The smoother the water looks, the more the town seems to hold its secrets with both hands.
This attention to territory, Captain Marleau has cultivated since September 15, 2015. Crime doesn’t fall from the sky here. It passes through ties, debts, reputations. It forces everyone to take a position.
Solidarity Versus Profitability, A Very Contemporary Conflict
The dramatic core of L’Amiral lies in a readable opposition. Clara, with Gabin Vauthier, a navy officer nicknamed the Admiral and played by Jacques Bonnaffé, was carrying a nautical base project for underprivileged children. Opposite him is a showcase logic, the one that wants to monetize the banks and sell the tranquility.
The script avoids lecturing. Everything passes through conversations, smiles that freeze, overly polite justifications. You quickly understand that the case isn’t only criminal. It touches the symbolic ownership of a place. Who decides. Who profits. Who will be asked to shut up.
Marleau, she, acts like a revealer. She lets people speak, then waits for the one detail too many. In this intimate theater, the truth betrays itself less by a confession than by a misplaced emotion.
Jacques Bonnaffé, And The Art Of Being Respectable
The episode’s title is an elegant lure. L’Amiral denotes a man, but also a stance. Bonnaffé plays this authority with a fragility that shows through. Prestige reassures the village, therefore 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 teen involved in thefts. Thus, the plot progressively shifts suspicion. It moves in the old way, by contradictions, by faces, by half-truths that tangle.
The regular partner, Bérot, played by Lorànt Deutsch, sharpens the pace. He recalls procedure, Marleau searches for the flaw. Between the two, the episode finds its stride.
And then there’s that very Marleau pleasure, that of guest actors who don’t just come for a cameo. The series has always liked to give actors a ground where they can be respectable, troubled, then suddenly vulnerable. Bonnaffé, in particular, is not a prestige token. He brings a shade of old France, a tired authority, and that fatigue becomes an indicator as much as an emotion.
Corinne Masiero, A Roughness That Protects
Marleau became an appointment because she resists standardization. Corinne Masiero gives her a raspy presence, a way of being in the world that refuses useless politeness. Her humor isn’t decoration, it’s a tactic.
In this episode of Captain Marleau, Masiero keeps a touch of melancholy, like a weariness with the world. She jokes, but she doesn’t forget. It’s this nuance that prevents the formula from running on empty, and that makes us listen as much to how Marleau speaks as to what she discovers.
Marpeau, Dayan, Chavagnac, The Making Of A Lasting Success
The series owes much to its production. Elsa Marpeau has set a tone under which the investigation serves to observe people. Josée Dayan films speech like a duel, leaving the landscape the role of a mute witness. The production, notably carried by Gaspard de Chavagnac, maintains this appointment identity.
The pattern may seem familiar, but it works by rhythm. We come back for the friction of temperaments and for the language. Moreover, this way of doing crime drama becomes a social mirror without a slogan.
It’s also a matter of format. A new episode of Captain Marleau is approached like a TV movie, with its breaths and moments of comedy, its scenes in which a face is allowed to think, contradict itself, recover. This assumed slowness becomes a luxury. It gives room to the characters, thus weight to their secrets. It finally allows 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 you can also find other Captain Marleau episodes on replay, and the replay invites you to revisit what you first took for simple entertainment. The series lends itself to this second reading because it isn’t reduced to its solution. It holds to a character, to a geography, to a way of looking.
At bottom, L’Amiral tells less of a murder than of an impossible sharing. A lake everyone wants to own, solidarity applauded as long as it costs nothing, profitability invoked as self-evident. Marleau comes to remind that a community is also defined by what it accepts to lose. Behind the humor and the ushanka, the series hits the mark.