'The Returned' comes to Channel 4

Read theartsdesk's review of episode 1 of The Returned

The Returned, which hits our screens on Sunday night, is the first foreign language drama to appear on Channel 4 in 20 years. Under its original title Les Revenants, it was a ratings-topping hit in France when it was broadcast on Canal+ last year. It looks like having every chance of cashing in on the current British vogue for stylish European dramas with subtitles, predominantly (though by no means exclusively) Scandinavian, and Sunday's debut episode will even feature an all-French ad break.

To make doubly sure of grabbing an audience, The Returned is about people coming back from the dead, a theme which has made The Walking Dead America's favourite show, fuels the new Brad Pitt extravaganza World War Z, and has spawned such home-grown series as Being Human, The Fades and In the Flesh. But, happily, The Returned is no chip-off-the-old-block ghoul-fest crammed with shambling moth-eaten corpses mumbling "fnurrrrggghhh" while trying to bite chunks out of the terrified citizenry.

Set in balefully bleak landscapes in the French Alps (which will ring a bell with British skiing buffs), it's about what happens when victims of a bus crash in the mountains four years earlier suddenly return to their home village, apparently alive and well but unable to remember what happened to them. In the first couple of episodes at least, they don't leave dollops of rotting flesh in their wake and seem to prefer cheese or breakfast cereal to the taste of human flesh (Yara Pilartz plays Camille, pictured above).

The emphasis is more on the strangeness and sadness of everybody's predicament, where the no-longer-dead can't understand what's happened to them, while their families and friends are torn between shock and disbelief and joy that their loved ones aren't dead after all. However, there's plenty more churning beneath the surface. It seems there may be other "revenants" from different times and even different species, while the return of the missing persons also coincides with the reappearance of a serial killer (oh no, not another one) from the past. Mark my words, there's murky business in prospect.

• The Returned begins on Sunday 9 June at 9pm on Channel 4