Prosecutor Adrien Jacquart is found dead in his room at a grand hotel above the Promenade des Anglais, and the list of people who might have wanted him gone has, by midsummer 1936, grown past counting. The Riviera is no longer the private garden of the families who built fortunes behind its shutters — the trains have brought factory hands, seamstresses, clerks who have never once seen the Mediterranean — and Summer ’36 opens at the precise moment those two Frances are forced to share one lobby. The body is the question the series asks first; the country pressing in around it is the question it actually means.

On its surface, Netflix‘s six-part limited series is a murder mystery: one death in Nice and four women — Blanche Akermann, Eugénie Berthier, Giulia Vincent, Léonie Morel — each with a reason to lie about it. What the series refuses is the reassuring shape of the classic whodunit: there is no single detective to trust, no central eye that gathers the suspects in a drawing room and explains them. Each woman holds a different fragment of the same summer, and what the audience pieces together, scene by scene, is less a solution than a diagram of who is allowed to stand where.

The historical stakes are precise. The Popular Front’s congés payés legislation, passed that June, handed salaried workers two weeks of paid leave — and the founding image of French egalitarian leisure, workers cycling toward a sea they had been told was not for them, was born in those weeks. Setting a killing at that exact threshold lets the series ask a question with modern resonance: whether access granted by law is access that lasts, or access on sufferance, extended for a season and quietly withdrawn. Eugénie, played by Sofia Essaïdi, and Giulia, played by Nolwenn Leroy, stand on the newcomers’ side of the line; Marthe Pontavice-Caron, played by Miou-Miou, guards what the line was built to protect. Julie de Bona’s Blanche and Constance Gay’s Léonie hold the frame between them.

Director Frédéric Garson, who shot all six episodes, films the hotel as a cross-section rather than a backdrop. The camera keeps crossing the building’s own frontier — service stair against terrace, laundry against ballroom — until geography becomes argument. Over 1,500 costumes and 74 reconstructed sets back the series, but the production uses its scale as evidence rather than spectacle: the exact cut of a maid’s uniform against the exact cut of a guest’s bathing costume is the social order rendered in cloth.

Summer ’36 comes from the same production engine — Quad Drama, TF1 and Netflix — behind Le Bazar de la Charité, and again places Julie de Bona at the centre of a female ensemble navigating class lines. Written by Catherine Touzet and Marie Deshaires from an original idea by Iris Bucher, it closes its crime on schedule. The larger question — whether the door that opened in that season stayed open, or whether the Riviera waited for September to close its gates — it leaves breathing. The country, as the series understands, has not yet settled that one.