Stream It Or Skip It?

Time jumps, at least the back-and-forth kind, are all the rage for prestige dramas these days. Sometimes the gambit works, sometimes it doesn’t. From what we’ve seen, the more care that’s taken with how each time period is presented goes a long way to helping make such a story cohesive and coherent. A new French thriller actively goes back and forth in time, using a device that definitely sets the two time periods apart.

Opening Shot: As foreboding music pays on a phonograph, the camera pans up from a bowl of cereal, some of which has spilled on the table. A little boy stares at a blue butterfly in a frame as the butterfly turns black.

The Gist: Author Adrien Winckler (Nicolas Duvauchelle) is at a creative impasse with the follow-up to his well-received first novel. So he drives out to the isolated house of Albert Desiderio (Niels Arestrup), a man in his seventies who has asked Adrien to write his memoir. As Adrien sits down with Albert, the older man wants to concentrate on his relationship with the love of his life, Solange (Alyzée Costes) who died a few decades ago.

He starts the story when they met, when both were around 12; he defended her against bullies who called her a “kraut whore,” and he saw the tough life she had, with a mother who took in “gentlemen callers” (i.e. customers) while Solange would wander around unsupervised. But that’s also when they fell in love.

Fast forward to when the two of them were around 20. Albert (Axel Granberger) and Solange are together but haven’t consummated their relationship yet. On the beach, the two of them encounter brothers who seem to be friendly, until one of the brother forces himself on Solange while Albert is in the water. She defends herself with a corkscrew, and Albert turns on the man’s brother to eliminate any witnesses. Albert has kept this incident secret for sixty years, and feels that Adrien is the one who should bring the story to light.

Adrien is dealing with his own past as he and his girlfriend Nora (Alice Belaïdi) try to have a child; he travels to Belgium to see visit the offices of the company his late father Wim started. His cousin invites him to the family mansion for dinner, but Adrien gets stopped at the door by his uncle — his dad’s brother — who considers Adrien and his mother personas non grata as far as the family is concerned. Nora finds Adrien’s manuscript based on his interviews with Albert, and starts talking it up to people.

Meanwhile, a police detective named Carrell (Sami Bouajila), who we see has a bold streak when he deals with a shotgun-wielding assailant, reexamines a cold murder case with a suspect who looks a lot like Solange.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? We’ve seen the back-and-forth time jump method Black Butterflies in shows ranging from This Is Us to Yellowjackets, but the tone of this series is more the latter than the former.

Our Take: Black Butterflies (Original title: Les papillons noirs) sets up an interesting dual storyline, with Adrien dealing with his own life turmoil while hearing about Albert and Solange, whom we feel weren’t done killing people on that beach back in the early sixties. Creators Olivier Abbou and Bruno Merle move the first episode along well, introducing the three sides of this story with just enough information to make the viewer intrigued about what comes next.

The person who gets the short end of the story stick is Carrell, but we get enough about him to know that he’s a gritty and determined detective, wiling to stare down a shotgun and almost get a face full of buckshot to disarm someone. But once he looks at that cold case file, involving the death of an American back in 1970, we know that the show is going to be about more than an old man telling an author the tale about the murder spree perpetrated by him and the love of his life.

We’re curious to know how Adrien’s troubled family life will connect into how he looks into what Albert is telling him, and how deep he’ll get into his subject’s life. Also, it feels like his relationship with Nora, which seems so solid in the first episode, won’t stay solid because of either his investigation or the fact that Nora seems to be happy reading the private files on his computer. But through the construction of Albert’s memoir, Abbou and Merle have provided an effective way to bounce back and forth in time in a way that alleviates any confusion and is pretty clear about where we are in a particular story.

Sex and Skin: Adrien and Nora get naked during a baby-making session, but the more provocative nudity comes when young Albert and Solange make love for the first time after they kill those brothers on the beach.

Parting Shot: Adrien trashes his novel manuscript and puts his pen name “Mody” on the manuscript of the Albert and Solange story. We then see older Albert staring out his window.

Sleeper Star: Alice Belaïdi is Nora, who seems to be a stabilizing force in Adrien’s life, but we’re not sure if that will stay that way.

Most Pilot-y Line: “My mother said you were a family of assholes. All except Wim. I just wanted to see for myself,” Adrien says to his uncle when the uncle threatens to call the police on him.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The format of Black Butterflies adds to both of its main storylines, even if they don’t look like they’ll come together during the first episode. When they do come together, we hope that the result is as entertaining as the first episode was.

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.