Unexpectedly in France for a fortnight, I was starting to wonder if there was anything good on TV other than dubbed versions of "CSI Miami" (known as "Les Experts, Miami," the most popular program in the country), "Desperate Housewives," "House," "Studio 60," etc. The American version of "The Office," for instance, had its debut Sunday, and it's amazing to me that the French couldn't come up with their own version of this British show, just as we managed to do. After all, filming a small group of ordinary looking actors in a generic office setting hardly calls for a massive budget.
Surely the French could have applied their own twist to the horrors of working for a paper supply company under the guidance of a deluded, egotistical boss? Mais, non. The American version will apparently have to do, though, to my mind, the French have a genius for comedy as witnessed in films like "The Dinner Game" and "Les Visiteurs.
" Is it a lack of ambition? A shortage of resources? A stultifying bureaucracy?
It's hard to tell. If there's one thing the French are good at, however, it's talking. This was confirmed a dozen times over when I chanced upon a chat show called "Esprits Libres" while flicking through channels as a dubbed version of "Nip/Tuck" went into a commercial break.
I missed the first 10 or 15 minutes, but fortunately there was more than an hour to go, and once I started watching I forgot all about trying to tabulate the assorted oddities of listening to American plastic surgeons speak French, though you get used to it surprisingly quickly. "Esprits Libres" was like "Charlie Rose" in the form of an intellectual cabaret act, and it made me realize that " Charlie Rose" could do with a touch of cabaret, maybe even a major dose of it. Watching it taught me that there's something missing on American TV, namely talk shows that combine intelligence with playfulness.
The closest thing we have to "Esprits Libres" is probably "Real Time With Bill Maher." But Mr. Maher, like Jon Stewart, is a comedian first and foremost, while the host of "Esprits Libres," Guillaume Durand, is an experienced journalist from a prominent French arts family.
Politics and art both get a far more thorough workout on his show than they ever do on "Real Time." Dressed casually in a dark blue jacket and dark blue open-necked shirt, Mr. Durand looked like a younger (he's 55), more raffish version of Mr.
Rose, and spoke three times as fast. He sat at an enormous round, white table, on which the show's title had been inscribed in expressionistic black paint, and there were daubs of more black paint elsewhere on the table, as if a devotee of Jean-Michel Basquiat had been let loose on it.
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