Three Pines: Alfred Molina’s new Prime Video thriller is basically Midsomer Murders set in Québec

Three Pines opens with a protest: a young woman of Indigenous heritage, Blue Two-Rivers, has been missing for a year, and her family feel like the Eastern Township police have neglected her case. It’s one of many, they say as they chant and cry – the Indigenous community feels utterly abandoned. When one of the protesters gets roughed up by an officer, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, played by Alfred Molina, rushes out of the station to break up the struggle and drives the woman home.

It’s an intriguing start: who is this gentle inspector and what has happened to Blue Two-Rivers? The mystery is set in a fictional town, Three Pines, in Québec’s Eastern Townships (which are located at the bottom of the province); a location where the political and social ramifications of hundreds of years of French and English colonial rule are very much still reverberating.

But then it all falters – the Blue Two-Rivers story regrettably takes a backseat to the murder of another woman (whose character is very not fleshed out). The townspeople didn’t like her, she was having an affair, was cruel to her daughter, hated by her husband, and is, incredibly, killed by being electrocuted in a chair. It’s all very simplistic, yet absurdly convoluted at the same time, sort of like a Midsomer Murders.

It’s frustrating as there’s lots of potential. In the best-selling Inspector Gamache books by Louise Penny that the series is based on, Gamache is a character we can all get behind. A native French speaker, he is said to have learnt his perfect English as a student at Cambridge. As a detective he’s reflective and forgiving. He believes kindness is more powerful than cruelty; that goodness will out. It makes for good, albeit a bit twee, reading.

But screenwriter Emilia di Girolamo misses the mark translating him onto screen, relying too heavily on corny, borderline implausible heart-to-hearts between the Inspector and practically everyone else, instead of showing us his hidden depths. So while Molina was made for the role of the soft but astute detective, he is limited by some clunky dialogue and some of his exchanges (and those of the series’ other characters, for that matter) make your nose wrinkle in embarrassment.

However, I’m not going to ditch Three Pines just yet. The eight-part series will be be broken down into four stand-alone stories comprised of two episodes each; only the first two parts were available for preview. The third episode is a brand new story with a brand new murder – perhaps the relationships will develop, now that Di Girolamo, who wrote the well-received Channel 4 miniseries Deceit, no longer needs to introduce characters, nor set the scene.

It’s also more than likely that the series will continue to illuminate Indigenous stories. Gamache’s team includes an Indigenous police officer, played by Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers (who is a member of the Kainai First Nation) who, it seems from a few intriguing conversations, is quietly grappling with her responsibilities to her two communities. At the end of the second episode, an Indigenous woman’s story reaches an emotional denouement, which seems likely to power much of the rest of the series.

In Québec, there are three geo-cultural groupings of Indigenous peoples, a mix of First Nations (there are ten in the territory), the Inuit and the Métis. Their historical exploitation has ongoing repercussions, and it’s both informative and moving to see several of these lives (which are most often left untold) play out (even if lacking depth) on screen.

Perhaps Blue Two-Rivers will not be abandoned after all.

Three Pines is released on Amazon Prime Video today, December 2