On April 15, 2019, the roof of the famed Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris caught fire. It eventually destroyed the roof and collapsed the cathedral’s spire. But the Paris Fire Brigade had to fight the fire differently than they usually do, in an effort to preserve what they could on the centuries-old structure. A new Netflix drama is built around that fire, with a number of stories revolving around the complex blaze.
NOTRE-DAME: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A closeup of a firefighter’s eyes, an orange hue is on her face from the light reflected by a fire. “I opened my eyes wide. I saw what was in front of me. And I knew that night would be the most important of my life,” a woman says in voice over.
The Gist: Alice (Megan Northam) is a rookie firefighter in Paris who has been suffering ever since the first fire she fought. While battling a fire in an old apartment building, a roof collapse injured her and killed two firefighters, including Benjamin Ducort (Victor Belmondo), whom she was also dating at the time. Two months later, she’s eager to get back out there, but her commanding officer, Colonel Gebrielle Varese (Caroline Proust), isn’t completely sure, especially after Alice’s training officer, Sergent Chief Taupin (Corentin Fila), told the colonel that Alice isn’t ready.
Meanwhile, Max (Simon Abkarian), the owner of a restaurant near Alice’s apartment, is dealing with life difficulties on a few levels. First, his wife is dying of cancer. Second, he seems to owe a local thug some money, and he sends two of his henchmen to the restaurant to collect. Third, he’s desperate to find his estranged daughter, Victorire (Marie Zabukovec), so she can say goodbye to her mother before she dies. Victorire has been working as an escort for the past couple of years, and we see her partying with a couple of friends at a club, waking up next to one of them, who’s unconscious from an overdose, and leaving that friend behind.
General Ducort (Roschoy Zem), a higher-up in the Paris Fire Brigade, tells his wife that he’s ready to move on from being a firefighter, especially after the death of their son Ben in that fire two months prior. But he puts that aside when duty calls: The Notre-Dame cathedral catches fire, starting in the attic and spreading quickly, threatening the church’s famed spire. Col. Varese sends Alice and Taupin ahead of the hose line to see how they can best tackle the fire and save what they can save, and she tries to convince General Ducort to agree to it once he shows up on the scene, even though he thinks keeping the firefighters away from risky maneuvers should be the priority.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Take a melodramatic first-responder drama like Station 19 or Chicago Fire and build it around the real-life, high-profile fire of a famous building that’s hundreds of years old, and you have Notre-Dame.
Our Take: Building a fictional story around a real-life event is tricky. You want to make sure you’re not just using the real-life event as a backdrop, but you also have to build a world and effective characters. In Notre-Dame, written by Olivier Bocquet and Hervé Hadmar (Hadmar also directed), tries to keep that balance, but shoves the famed cathedral almost literally in the background in the first episode, to the point where these stories could have taken place around just about any large fire.
There was a lot at stake when the cathedral caught fire three years ago; it burned for three hours before the Paris Fire Brigade got it under control. There was a tremendous effort to keep the fire away from the cathedral itself but the brigade also decided to do what it could to preserve the spire. It didn’t help that the structure of the roof was all wood, much of it over 700 years old.
But you can’t create a six-episode miniseries around decisions about how to go about saving a church spire. And we expect that the cathedral and the issues unique to a fire there will take a more prominent spot in subsequent episodes. But we didn’t get a lot of it in the first episode. What we got was two related stories that centered around a previous fire, and a third story — Max trying to find his daughter — that we figure will tie into the fire and the other stories at some point.
Are those stories compelling, at least? We’re not sure yet. For now, they all feel like they’re stories lifted from other dramas. But as the fire rages, that may change.
Sex and Skin: Even in a scene where Victorire and her friend have some bathroom fun with a client, there isn’t any nudity, or even simulated sex.
Parting Shot: After seeing a vision of Ben in the middle of the enflamed roof joists, Alice pushes further into the flames.
Sleeper Star: We’ve enjoyed Roschdy Zem in his previous work, and he brings a lot of gravitas to his role as General Ducort, who has been ambivalent about being a firefighter since his son’s death.
Most Pilot-y Line: We get why movies and TV shows continue to do this, but it seems that if the entire roof structure of Notre-Dame was on fire, a firefighter couldn’t walk around in it and see anything. It would be too hot, too toxic and too dark. But hot, toxic and dark doesn’t make for a good on-screen fire, does it?
Our Call: STREAM IT. The only reason why we’re recommending Notre-Dame is that the acting is decent and we’re hoping that the issues surrounding such a momentous fire take more of a prominent role as the series goes on.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.