Fans of French drama will be aware that there’s not been a great deal of sex in The Returned – far less than in your usual Gallic goings on – but that’s changed this week.

New Year’s Eve. Always a letdown. But this December 31st, whether you’re having every atom of your privacy invaded in a club so packed that it resembles a box of sweaty styrofoam peanuts, or you’re sat at home with a sherry, waiting to salute the clock at midnight, think on this: it could be worse. You could be in an underpass, caving in your cannibalistic brother’s head with a crowbar as he tries to eat Catwoman’s pancreas. ‘Should auld acquaintance be forgot’?. Ideally, yes.

If you turned Episode 4 of The Returned into a drinking game, with the rule of having a shot every time someone discovered a secret, then by the time the credits rolled you’d be lying unconscious on the floor, being eaten by your cats Mme Payet style.

Last week The Returned felt like a police procedural with a David Lynch haircut. This week it has the aura of a soap opera wrapped about it. A weird soap opera but a good one, similar in result to if Rod Serling wrote an entire week’s worth of Neighbours. ‘So Paul Robinson’s cursed false leg was an allegory for America’s relationship with Communist Cuba? Wow…’.

Just two episodes in and we already love The Returned.

Like a master vintner blending the best grape varieties to make a great bottle of Bordeaux, so The Returned mixes the ripe genres of Scandinavian crime, American mystery, and French drama, into a multinational melange that appeals to the taste buds of those of us who like to get telly drunk on a Sunday night.