17 Little Known Shows To Stream When You’ve Run Out Of Ideas
By Sundi Rose
Photo: SundanceTV
The Returned
Don’t mistake this The Returned for the cheesy, anemic remake that aired on A&E last year. The Returned or better yet, Les Revenants, is a French series about a small mountain town in which a handful of previously dead folks suddenly turn back up.
The Revenants is not a zombie show in that the returning dead are decaying, crumbling, corpses trying to eat their loved ones’ brains. The people who come back return just as they left, even though in some cases, years have passed. They are exactly the same as when they died, except they don’t remember what happened after their deaths.
The show has its share of thrilling and creep-out moments, but it’s really a meditation about grief and figuring out how to lose someone. It’s so beautifully wrought, with it’s drizzly, moody mountainscapes, and greyscale cinematography.
Aside from the allegory about human emotions, there are also some unexplained power outages, the lowering of the town’s water reservoir, bizarre animal deaths, and strange marks appearing on the living and the dead. As the families try to cope with the reappearance of their loved ones, they are also trying to sort out what it means for the town as a whole.
Both seasons one and two of The Returned (Les Revenants) are available on Netflix.