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Isabelle Adjani is re-teaming with “The King’s Favorite” director Josée Dayan on the six-part mystery thriller “Belphégor.”

The acclaimed actress stars as the enigmatic 16th-century noblewoman and courtier Diane de Poitiers in “The King’s Favorite,” which premiered at the Unifrance Rendez-Vous on Monday.

The €7.6 million (7.5 million), four-part series, produced by Dayan’s Passion Films and sold internationally by France TV Distribution, examines de Poitiers’ complicated relationship with the young French king, Henry II (played by Hugo Becker), that lasted more than two decades. The large ensemble cast also includes Samuel Labarthe, Virginie Ledoyen and Gérard Depardieu.

Adjani next stars in an action-comedy helmed by Mélanie Laurent, which is set to go into production next week, Adjani told Variety.

Adjani is also set to star in a TV thriller alongside Benjamin Biolay likewise to be directed by Dayan later this year and described as in the style of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s “Diabolique.

We delve deep into the mists of time to discover the origins of the sequel, and come up with an unusual prime suspect…

If you want to blame somebody in particular for the rise and lingering popularity of movie sequels, you may want to point an accusatory finger at Johannes Gutenberg. Several hundred years before the first moving image was projected onto a wall somewhere in the late Victorian era, it was with the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg and his contemporaries that the concept of the sequel almost certainly began.

The first book to go into mass publication was the Bible, which was hardly the kind of book you'd dare to attempt to follow up with a sequel (though Jerry Bruckheimer may have tried, had he been a 15th century publisher). It was the modern novel, an invention that properly came into being in the 1700s, that...