One thing that will strike you quickly is that Les Revenants is French. Very French! This might sound like a completely superfluous statement. But Les Revenants is completely different from a British cult TV show like Dr Who, a Swedish cult show like äkta människor, a Danish cult show like The Kingdom or an American cult show like The X Files.
What links all of this programs, including Les Revenants is that they have the capacity to become a cult show, or a show with an enthusiastic and ultimately active audience. Les Revenants almost seems to have been created purely to elicit a strong love/hate relationship with it's deliberately enigmatic storylines, it's range of varied characters and it's highly atypical soundtrack by cult Glaswegian post rock band Mogwai.
As you watch the first episode, consider the following:
Cinematography
Editing
Soundtrack
Performance, character archetypes and characterisation
Setting
Representation
Hermeneutic codes and enigmas
Generic conventions and atypical features. Zombie? Drama? Mystery? Cult? Horror? 'New French extreme'???
Intertextuality
'Frenchness'