The French drama “Malditos” (in French, with subtitles, or dubbed), on Max, is set within a traveler community whose members are about to be displaced from the dilapidated carnival fairgrounds where they live and work. The show hits brutal, operatic highs, with its deadly scheming playing out against the dramatic landscape of Camargue, in southern France. Give us blinding fraternal strife, and give it to us on a sun-bleached salt flat.
Sara (Céline Sallette), who instead of a crown and a scepter has a scowl and a cigarette, is determined to keep the clan together. But everyone around her has different ideas about how to scrounge up enough money — and enough mutual will — to do so.
Especially her sons. The brash, excitable son, Tony (Darren Muselet), wants to get into the lucrative drug market — or maybe he wants to run away with his girlfriend, who is from a rival clan. The brooding, bitter son, Jo (Pablo Cobo), who was forced to abandon his career ambitions, has his own vision for leadership, one he honed during years of estrangement from his mother and brother. Sara, Tony and Jo all think they are keeping the same secret, but they aren’t quite.
The show wears its Shakespearean power-jockeying as comfortably as its track jackets. “You’re a real prince,” a vulnerable man stutters at Jo, begging for his life. Every bright idea just illuminates the path toward a more severe catastrophe, and pretty soon, the bodies are piling up. Some are even being exhumed.
Violence abounds, both in harebrained shoot-em-ups and in the startling volatility of a bull. One person might be leveled by a mob-led beat-down or by the punishing rains of an unrelenting storm. Another might be swallowed up by oppressive gender roles or spit out by expensive real estate regulations.
A few of the twists and turns here can feel a little predictable, and all that glowering starts losing its impact after a while. But the show has plenty of fresh ideas and true surprises in its specifics and realism, in its characters’ rites and traditions. “Malditos” teases out how religion, superstition and harshly enforced cultural customs are both the fabric and the rend. There’s a bright beauty to a tough-guy dad tenderly officiating a poetic marriage ritual, and also a cold horror at the bride’s numb concessions and deep despair.
Four episodes are available now, and the remaining three arrive on Fridays.
Margaret Lyons is a television critic at The Times, and writes the TV parts of the Watching newsletter.
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