If all cop shows, celebrity travelogues and cooking competitions were to disappear overnight, the world of television would risk imploding. They are the load-bearing walls that sustain the whole structure. The sheer volume of these shows means that inevitably, there are tiny, specialised niches within each genre. Take Canadian crime drama Saint-Pierre, for example. Have you ever wondered what a slightly grittier Death in Paradise might look like? If so, you’re in luck.

Just to make things even more familiar, Death in Paradise alumna Joséphine Jobert can be found in Saint-Pierre, too, co-starring as deputy chief Geneviève “Arch” Archamboult, a Parisian cop who, for reasons which will eventually become clear, has been transplanted to the tiny north Atlantic French territory of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon. She is joined by another mildly troubled blow-in, Allan Hawco’s Royal Newfoundland Constabulary inspector Donny “Fitz” Fitzpatrick, a detective who has been shunted into obscurity after digging a little too vigorously into the nefarious deeds of a politician on his previous beat. Perhaps inevitably in this context, he’s struggling with a difficult private life, which lends him a slightly dishevelled air. He’s also prone to sea sickness, which, given his new placement on a small island, is not ideal. Pretty much as we meet him, he’s hacking up his breakfast into a nearby rockpool. The locals are not sympathetic.

In fairness, Fitz doesn’t make himself easy to like. He has a habit of beginning every sentence with “Where I come from …”, which isn’t the best way to endear himself to the local force. However, he is plunged straight into crime-fighting mayhem. According to Wikipedia, the eight islands that make up Saint-Pierre and Miquelon have a population of about 5,500 people. On the basis of this series, we must assume that roughly one in 20 of them are murderers and plenty of the others are, variously, fraudsters, drug-runners, religious cranks and gangsters. It’s a very pretty but evidently incredibly dangerous place, so it’s no wonder Fitz has found his way there – it’s the law enforcement equivalent of the naughty step.

Anyway, into the fray Fitz goes. His first case involves the murdered leader of a religious community. There’s a nicely staged and lit body in a church. Intrigue involving a craft honey-trafficking operation (honestly, is there no pastime so wholesome these people can’t turn it into criminality?) and a partner of the victim who is set to inherit everything. She pleads her innocence but, inconveniently, a gun she bought online is found at the murder scene.

The case resolves itself briskly and Fitz partially earns his spurs. And so the format is established. It’s a crime-of-the-week situation, with a side order of mild character development and an underpinning storyline about islander Sean Gallagher (James Purefoy) who is clearly a bad egg but has a direct line into the police department. The dialogue is often desperately clunky (“Who changes their name?” “Someone with something to hide!”) and it’s formulaic to the point of self-parody. The conclusions are always neat, usually involving a perp outlining their evil plan and stopping only just short of proclaiming that they’d have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you meddling kids. Every episode ends with Arch and Fitz, having solved the case, chewing the fat, sparring gently about their respective mysterious pasts before having an extremely mild disagreement about something. It’s the traditional conversational dance of the minor cop show, a means of drip-feeding just about enough personal information to the audience to keep things ticking over.

And yet Saint-Pierre isn’t terrible. It’s too inoffensive for that. The lead couple have a sweet, albeit overfamiliar kind of chemistry – perched right on the line between mutual irritation and fondness; the factory setting of counterintuitively functional fictional detective duos since the dawn of television. The location is intriguing and picturesque and the backstories unfurl engagingly.

It’s at its strongest when Fitz’s hidden trauma about his lost family starts leaking out into his professional life. At those points, you wonder whether, if taken a little further, Saint-Pierre might have the potential to pioneer a new micro-genre. Creepy-cosy crime, anyone? But probably not. Really, Saint-Pierre wouldn’t want to push too hard. It knows what it is and where it belongs. And as far as gentle cop shows go, the ecosystem of television will always make room for one more.