Acorn TV to Debut French-Set Series 'Cannes Confidential'

Acorn TV initially commissioned Cannes Confidential in the summer of 2020 on the heels of greenlighting Ms. Fisher’s Modern Mysteries for a second season. With the Hollywood lockdowns in full swing that summer, the press release stated the show would not go into production for at least another year and arrive at the end of 2021. It also boasted of being the first English-language procedural drama produced and set on the Cote d’Azur since the 1970s. Unfortunately, delays pushed work back, but the series is finally slated to arrive on Acorn TV in the states in the spring of 2023.

Of course, by now, the “first English series set in the Cote d’Azur” in nearly half a century has been a bit upended, as competition BritBox has since made Murder in Province, announced a year later in 2021, which arrived much faster in early 2022. But where Murder in Provence was more of a lax three-feature-length affair, Acorn TV’s new series is a far more hardboiled show, with a love story between an idealistic cop and an ex-conman for the mafia who are partners in detection when they’re not bickering and/or falling into bed together.

The eight-episode series announced its main cast when production finally got underway in May 2022, with French TV actor Lucie Lucas (Gloria) in the role of Detective Camille Delmasse and British actor Jamie Bamber (Battlestar Galactica) as ex-mafia con artist Harry King. The series also promised to show the “real” side of Cannes as a city full of fishing boats and local tradesmen, the people Delmasse hails from, and the more glamorous side as a playground for the rich, a world King has spent his life trying to embody.