2021 - Present
Lupin landed on Netflix in January 2021 and did something no French production had managed before: it became a genuine global phenomenon. Part 1 dropped five episodes, Part 2 followed in June 2021 with five more, and Part 3 arrived in October 2023 with seven. Part 4 has been confirmed by Netflix.
Omar Sy plays Assane Diop, a contemporary Parisian master thief who has spent his life re-reading Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin novels the way other men study sacred texts. Assane does not think he IS Lupin. He uses Lupin as a manual. The cons are lifted from a book first published in 1907. So are the disguises and the misdirections, adapted for modern Paris, modern surveillance, and a modern target: the Pellegrini family, whose patriarch Hubert Pellegrini framed Assane's Senegalese father Babakar for the theft of Marie Antoinette's diamond necklace 25 years ago.
The opening heist at the Louvre tells you what kind of show you are getting. Clever and plotted, with a bit of cheek. Designed to be watched on a Friday night with a bottle of wine. I finished the first five episodes in two nights.
The show lives or dies on Omar Sy, and Omar Sy was already one of France's biggest stars before this from Intouchables. Here he plays Assane as a leading man who is all four things at once. Charming. Physically imposing. Vulnerable about his father and permanently two moves ahead of the room. It is the kind of performance that makes international careers, and it did.
Around him the ensemble is consistently strong:
Guédira is the show's secret weapon. A cop in love with the source material. You keep waiting for him to be believed, and you keep watching him get ignored because no senior officer will entertain the idea that a thief is working from a novel.
On the surface is a heist caper. Watch it for the plans and the swaps, the disguises, and the "oh, so THAT is how he did the thing from the cold open" reveals. It works at that level. Great.
Vincent Londez
Captain Romain Laugier
Fargass Assandé
Babakar Diop
Soufiane Guerrab
Inspector Youssef Guédira
Shirine Boutella
Sofia Belkacem
Nicole Garcia
Anne Pellegrini
Ludivine Sagnier
Claire
Hervé Pierre
Hubert Pellegrini
Omar Sy
Assane Diop
The thing that gave it global staying power is the layer underneath. Assane is Black, Senegalese-French, working-class by origin, and he has built a plan to destroy one of the richest white families in France using a literary tradition written in 1907 for bourgeois Parisian readers. He is taking a symbol of old French gentility and aiming it at the people who still own France.
The sequences where Assane is NOT Lupin are, in a lot of ways, the best in the show. He is stopped by police. He is followed around shops. On the street he is treated with suspicion by default. A man who can vanish from the Louvre in a cleaner's coat cannot walk into a Parisian department store without a uniformed guard checking him. The show lets you sit in the gap between the two experiences and draw the obvious conclusion without ever making a speech about it.
I want to be clear. This is not a message drama. It is a heist caper that happens to be clever enough to let its lead actor's lived reality into the scenes where it matters, and then cut back to him stealing a painting. Both readings are true. Neither cancels the other.
Louis Leterrier directed the first two parts, which is why everything looks like a high-budget action film shot at eye level rather than a Netflix co-production shot at chest level. Paris is the co-star. Not the postcard version. The grey-roofed winter version. The show shoots on rooftops and in Métro stations, at the Gare du Nord, in Normandy cemeteries, and in the back rooms of auction houses.
The score leans heavy on percussion and strings, the wardrobe is deliberately unshowy (Assane is usually in coats any Parisian man could own), and the pacing is European, with more room to breathe between set pieces than an American streaming equivalent would allow. Episodes are roughly 40 to 50 minutes, and the story arcs come in short runs of five to seven rather than 10 to 13. This is one of the best things Netflix does when it lets a European production work the way it wants to.
If you liked Money Heist for its heist choreography, you will recognise the DNA, though Lupin is quieter and more character-led. If you liked The Spy for Sacha Baron Cohen carrying a prestige limited series on charisma alone, Omar Sy does the same job here across a longer canvas.
Lupin became Netflix's biggest-ever French original on release, and one of the biggest non-English-language launches the platform had put out at that point. It drew favourable reviews in France and internationally for production value, Omar Sy's performance, and the way it folded a 115-year-old literary property into a contemporary Paris without feeling like a museum piece.
It also did the thing every non-English-language hit hopes to do. It opened doors. Omar Sy was already a domestic star. After Lupin, he was a globally bankable name. The show normalised French drama on Netflix home pages in the US and UK, a route later walked by other French originals and (more broadly) by European productions like The Diplomat and The Night Agent that assume audiences will follow a strong concept regardless of where it is shot.
Creator George Kay already had British crime television credits like Criminal: UK and Hijack, and the tightness of the plotting here shows that hand. François Uzan brings the French sensibility. Louis Leterrier directs the opening like a feature. I came back for Part 3 the week it dropped.
A heist show where the trick isn't the trick. The trick is the man doing the trick.
Most heist television runs on one engine: can they pull it off. Lupin runs on two. Can Assane pull it off, and can he do it without becoming the man the system would like him to be. That second question is why the show has weight beyond its cleverness.
Omar Sy is the reason. He plays Assane with a lightness that never tips into smugness and a grief about his father that never tips into melodrama. You believe he could vanish in a Métro station. You also believe he goes home and cannot sleep.
The Lupin-books-as-playbook conceit is a gift for a novelist, and it is used properly. Guédira reading the novels and connecting them to the crimes is the most satisfying detective work in the show. Assane reading the novels as a boy with his father is the most emotionally loaded.
Three parts in, with a fourth on the way, this is still one of the most watchable things on Netflix. If you passed on it because it is subtitled, get over it. Put it on. You will finish Part 1 in two nights.
Antoine Gouy
Benjamin Férel
Stefan Crepon
Philippe Courbet
Clotilde Hesme
Juliette Pellegrini