Jo (previously known by the working title Le Grand) is an English-language French police procedural television series created by Canadian-American screenwriter René Balcer of Law & Order fame with French writing team Franck Ollivier and Malina Detcheva, known for the miniseries Lost Signs, and variously directed by Charlotte Sieling (The Killing), Kristoffer Nyholm (Taboo, The Vanishing), Sheree Folkson (Another Life), Stefan Schwartz (The Americans).

It is co-produced by the French Atlantique Productions and the Belgian Stromboli Pictures companies in association with broadcast partners TF1, RTBF, Sat.1, ORF and RTS.

The series, shot entirely in Paris, is centered on Jo Saint-Clair, a cop played by French star Jean Reno in his first lead TV role.

As brilliant as he is fearsome, Saint-Clair has the intelligence of serial killers, allowing him to solve a series a crimes plaguing the French capital's most iconic sights: the Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame, the Catacombs, the Place Vendôme.

Canadian actress Jill Hennessy was named the second regular as shooting began, playing a nun who is a close friend of Reno's character,[10] making it her fourth lead role in a TV show.

Attracted by the idea of shooting in Paris with actors he admires, the 24-year-old was however able to get a meeting with director Charlotte Sieling, whose work on The Bridge was also among the reasons the project interested him, and along with her he managed to convince the producers that he was right for the part and began his gun training a few days later.

[13] Production began on the Île de la Cité at 4 a.m.[12] on July 16, 2012 and lasted for 88 days[14] in Paris and its suburbs until November 8,[13] making it the first English-language show to be shot entirely in the French capital.

The production designer for the season was Ambre Sansonetti, who's had considerable experience on police procedurals having held the same position on the TV show Braquo as well as the films 36 Quai des Orfèvres and MR 73.

In Télérama, Samuel Douhaire found that the famous locations of Paris showcased in every episode were used very badly, that the cops looked like caricatures from American shows and that the series' worst aspect is its cliché-ridden exploration of Jo's private life.

[16] In the Belgian Le Vif, Guy Verstraeten was also turned off by the clichéd nature of the show, stating that the creators couldn't be bothered to create a single original thing.

In the Irish Independent, John Boland was baffled by the use of English, felt that the Paris locales brought nothing and wrote that the show "ends up like a diluted hybrid of Criminal Minds, Leverage, NCIS and any or all of the CSI spin-offs".

[23] Eurodrama called it "A visually arresting series with a tightly controlled central performance from Jean Reno, [that] takes us on a whistle-stop tour of Paris' most sensational locations, and its most depraved, but never shifts its focus from the story of a man who will always be enslaved by anguish.".

Joe is wonderfully engrossing and thrilling with lavish set pieces, and is carried by a marvelous central performance by Reno who is at his surly and cantankerous best.

In Belgium La Une started showing the series on April 18, 2013, and RTS Un in Switzerland the next day, where it completed its run in four weeks at a pace of two episodes per night.

[12] Confusingly, the Fox International Channels in Africa, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latin America, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom as well as RTL Klub in Hungary on one hand and La Une, RTS Un, TF1, ORF eins and Sat.1 in Belgium, France, Switzerland, Austria and Germany on the other have aired or plan to air the episodes of the series in two different orders, reflected in the following chart.

[42] According to Balcer, scenes which had been cut from the official version because of poor performances or directing (for example, in Pigalle, the interview with a witness on the Eiffel tower and a search of the victim's apartment) were put back in by TF1.

TF1 announced the show's cancellation on June 7, 2013, shortly before filming on the second season was scheduled to begin, citing disappointing ratings and prohibitive costs.

[2] A few days later, co-creator René Balcer reacted to the news at the Monte-Carlo Television Festival, expressed hope that the series might still continue due to its international success and blamed TF1 and the changes they made to the show for its reception in France and wherever the TF1 version was shown.

Jo was allegedly going to be Ion's first foray into an original TV series, but things went awry, either because the network got cold feet or there was a terrible misunderstanding.

[44] The original English sound track will be legally available on August 5, 2013, when UK distributor Arrow Films is set to release the Fox edits on DVD, also spread over two discs.