If The Bureau — about the DGSE, France’s equivalent of the CIA — had been made in the US, there would be a specially created nice, upstanding, Americanized Muslim character like the agent in The Looming Tower or the implausible black Muslim character in Jack Ryan. They exist to show the benighted viewer that just because these series are set in hellholes where diarrhea is a way of life and black-clad death cultists would saw your head off as soon as look at you, this should in no way be interpreted as casting aspersions on the benign, gentle and loving adherents of the Religion of Peace. It’s one of the reasons I find US- and UK-made dramas so hard to stomach. I don’t want moral guidance from my television thrillers. I want ugly, grubby, cynical realism, no matter how unflattering it may be.