This thriller series, rated at 96%, remained completely unnoticed: the new season was released in 2024

News culture This thriller series, rated at 96%, remained completely unnoticed: the new season was released in 2024

The press is being seduced, not the public

Ahead of its release in 2022, the television series The tourist calls. Something due to two of its characteristics. First, it puts actor Jamie Dornan in the spotlight. The latter is the star of the adaptations of “Fifty Shades of Grey”, where he plays the role of Christian Grey. Secondly, the thriller series will be broadcast in France on France 2. Here is the synopsis.

A man is driving calmly through the Australian outback when a semi-trailer suddenly chases him and eventually drives him off the road. The man wakes up in the hospital, miraculously alive, but injured and, above all, without the slightest memory. He will then do everything he can to find out who he is and, most importantly, why someone wants to kill him…

An act that appeals to the press, as evidenced by the reviews listed on RottenTomatoes: the review aggregator has a 96% media endorsement. A number that drops to 60% on the public side.

A complex scenario

The tourist does not take the spectators with him. An observation that we can formulate even more after the release of season 2 in 2024. The latter has almost the same audience ratings, whether from the press or the public. Word of mouth often remains the driving force behind fame for TV series, and the first season seems to have failed to get viewers on board. Defects that may be related to the complexity of the scenario or an underlying tone already seen. It’s screenwriter Harry Williams, rolled into one Interview at Allociné in 2022which explains:

And to tackle such a topic, the hero’s amnesia seemed ideal to us. But it is a process that we have seen many times on television and in the cinema, be it in soaps or in the Jason Bourne saga. So we had to treat amnesia differently and wanted to aim for something more real that viewers could relate to, but also darker.

All of our series have been difficult to write, but it’s true that this one was particularly complex. Fortunately and paradoxically, filming on The Tourist was postponed by a year due to Covid, giving us a much longer writing time than expected. This was particularly useful for the second half of the series. The first three episodes were fully written, but the rest were more complex to construct.

At the time of writing, Season 3 has not been officially announced.