Paul Casserly: Bring out your dead (+video)

A scene from French mystery Les Revenants.

Paul Casserly says you should watch French mystery Les Revenants.

How do I write about Les Revenants without spoiling the surprise for you? That's tricky. I will give you but a taste.

Les Revenants - also known in English as The Returned and Rebound - begins with a school bus winding its way through the French Alps.

It soon leaves the road to the sound of screams. In the next scene we are looking at a display case of mounted butterflies, one starts to move and duly breaks through the glass and takes off.

Then, before you catch your breath, it's a year later and the girl who we saw on that doomed bus is walking along the road that runs across the top of a huge dam. WTF?

So there's definitely something supernatural at play here, but think Top of The Lake more than The Sixth Sense.

Given the recent orgy of Scandi dramas, it's refreshing to have a French one for a change. The alpine scenery and un-dead nature of the plot also has me thinking about the brilliantly chilly vampire thriller Let The Right One In, so we're talking a seriously classy production here.

I'll throw in one more reference before I move on: It made me think of the movie The Sweet Hereafter, and maybe a touch of Lost as well while we're at it.

Watch the trailer for Les Revenants:

I typically have a short attention span when things get too ghostly but this feels different. For one thing the soundtrack is provided by Scottish band Mogwai.

Following the slow-moving but satisfying Rectify, Rialto has done well to latch on to this series. On the basis of episode one it feels like it might be up there with some of the best of the recent recent batch of appointment TV, like say Mad Men or The Killing.

Season three of The Killing (the US one) has turned out to be one of the best shows of the year and the recent finale was nothing short of a masterpiece.

Thankfully, they really got their shit together for season three after a patchy one and two, which made the show a bit of a poor cousin to the original. This time the story is more complete and the addition of Peter Sarsgaard, as a death row prisoner, was nothing short of inspired.

And when you spot names like Jonathon Deme (Silence of the Lambs) in the credits you realise just why this thing is so flipping great.

There's also something cool about the evolution of this show. The Danish, wanting to replicate the success of US crime procedurals like the CSI's and SVU's, sent their people to Hollywood a decade back to learn how to do it.

Now Hollywood is learning how to do it from the Danes, although I should point out that the woman behind the US iteration, Veena Sud, isn't a Scandi as I had assumed, but is a Canadian of Filipino and Indian heritage.

Anyway, that's all over now, and while I'm excited by the prospect of the impending final Breaking Bad season, it's good to have a show like Rebound in the bank as a backup.

Given the brilliance hinted at by that first episode of Rebound, I'd be surprised if an American version of this show isn't already being shot in Colorado or Whistler.

But I may be getting ahead of myself, it has been known to happen, but just in case, I suggest getting in from the beginning on Rialto on Wednesday at 8.30pm.

There's other new stuff to keep an eye out for this week, apart from Breaking Bad (Monday, 8.30pm, Soho) and Rebound.

Tonight there's Ohio Slave Girls (love the subtle title), the hot-off-the-press doco about the kidnapped victims of Ariel Castro, on Prime at 9.30pm.

On Tuesday there's Cause of Death: Unknown, a new Kiwi true-crime series (TV One, 8pm) followed later in the evening by a US show for fans of The Closer called Major Crimes.

This is one I won't be missing: A Boatload of Wild Irishman, a doco about the 'father' of documentary filmmaking (Rialto, 8.30pm Thursday).

I just watched the trailer and it looks tremendously interesting and a must for film geeks. What a great title too, although the show with the best handle of all is on Thursday and is called ... drum roll please ... The Man with the World's Largest Testicles (9.30pm, TV2).

The blurb says that it follows poor old Wesley Warren Jr as he goes in for an op to deal with his "extreme scrotal elephantitis".

But did you know that there's no such thing as "elephantitis"? True story. It's all explained here.

For the latest entertainment updates, follow @nzherald_ent on Twitter.