IT’S Emmy Award season but rather than dwell on television’s past it might be better to dwell on its future.

What follows are the best (and worst) of autumn series previewed at the recently concluded Series Mania, the Festival of Global Television in the French north-west former mining centre of Lille, where many of the series were concerned with either highlighting or concealing and smoothing over class differences in the wake of the vast transfer of wealth that has followed the Covid billionaire accumulation in the online goldrush.
 
The location was relevant because the best of these series was a new French public television version of Germinal. Two episodes of the six were broadcast at sites throughout this region which, when Zola wrote the novel in the 1880s about a coalminers’ action in 1860, was still the coalmining and industrial centre of the world.

The novel is a long debate about the need for, the effectiveness of, and the tactical ways of managing a strike as a way of workers clawing back some measure of decency from a life which requires ever more sacrifices just to make one’s daily bread.