The last shot of Season One of Les Revenants/The Returned (Canal+, 2012–15) finds the hit French television show's nameless mountain town suddenly, mysteriously, catastrophically flooded. Water has rushed in to a place that, for the past eight episodes, has been the site of another unruly invasion: of the dead, les revenants, come back to life. They are not violent. They just want to resume the lives they lost months or years earlier. By the beginning of Season Two, the army has come to take control, managing the double catastrophe caused by a dam that cannot hold back water and the town's returned dead.

When the show first aired, it brought the French past itself into the present, for the image of a mountain community in the Haute-Savoie threatened by water, almost vacant, and under state control recalls similar historical events of more than 50 years earlier. In March 1952, the valley containing the mountain village of Tignes was flooded to make way for a new hydroelectric dam on the Isère River. Four hundred CRS were called in to remove resisting residents and dynamite their homes to prevent them from returning. These actions were the culmination of one of the most contentious and visible battles between state technocrats and the opponents – one might say victims – of modernisation that animated the early years of France's Trente Glorieuses (Fourastié 2000; Frost 1985). Although never explicitly identified, this is the same dam that appears throughout Les Revenants. Its return to French screens underpins a broader allegory about state-sponsored modernisation and its legacy, a once-‘glorious’ project returned as a story of failure and unintended consequences.

For critics and industry professionals, the returned dead of the show represented another level of allegory: the return of French dramatic television to a level of quality it had not enjoyed for decades. Les Revenants was one of the first French shows to garner public interest and critical accolades during what critics have dubbed ‘the golden age of television’. Its first season attracted record audiences and critical praise in France before being picked up for diffusion by Swedish, British, Dutch, and American channels and winning a 2013 International Emmy for Best Dramatic Series.