Viewers may notice something eerily familiar about Sky’s new serial killer drama The Tunnel, which begins with the discovery of a body in the Channel tunnel halfway between Britain and France.

It is, according to Sky, an “adaptation” of the Scandinavian drama hit The Bridge – in which a body is found in the middle of the Øresund Bridge, connecting Denmark and Sweden.

The Tunnel, which starts on Wednesday, is the story of a politically motivated serial killer and is believed to be the first bilingual TV drama to be filmed in English and French. It features the same “odd couple” detective pairing as The Bridge, from which it lifts much of its plot and some scenes wholesale.

But while the nuances of the original’s Danish-Swedish interplay may have been lost on some viewers, this version focuses on a relationship much closer to home.

“We made it particular to the French-British experience,” said Jane Featherstone, chief executive of Kudos Film and Television, the drama’s co-producer, which also made ITV’s murder mystery hit Broadchurch.

“We are neighbours and have so much in common and yet we are hundreds of miles apart on so many things – and this was an incredible opportunity to explore that,” she said. “The team took what was wonderful from [the original] and then forgot about it, in the nicest possible way, and made their own show.”

Laid-back British detective Karl Roebuck is played by Stephen Dillane – who plays Stannis Baratheon in the fantasy hit Game of Thrones – opposite his uptight French opposite number, Elise Wassermann, played by Clémence Poésy from BBC1 drama Birdsong.

Neither actor had watched the original, which had one of BBC4’s largest-ever audiences, with more than 1 million viewers last year. Poésy’s character, with her hints of Asperger’s syndrome, is closer to her counterpart in the original (Sofia Helin’s Swedish detective, Saga Norén) than Dillane’s Roebuck, whose role parallels that of Kim Bodnia’s Danish cop, Martin Rohde.

Ben Richards, the lead writer whose previous credits include BBC1’s Spooks, said the story had changed “quite significantly while always working around that brilliant premise, this idea of the truth and what it means, and the relationship between personal and political motives”. He added: “I loved the mixture of English and French in the show but I was worried about what it would look like,” Richards said. “Most people can take a subtitled film, but can people take something that’s moving between two languages?”

A collaboration with French broadcaster Canal+, it is the latest Scandinavian drama to be remade after the US version of The Killing and comes before a mooted stateside remake of political thriller Borgen. The Bridge has also been remade in the US (the body is found on the US-Mexico border between El Paso and Juarez) for Rupert Murdoch’s FX. Featherstone said it had taken “months of gentle negotiation” to obtain permission to film the grisly scenes under the Channel. Dominik Moll, lead director and part of a mixed French-English team of writers and directors, said: “The only thing they didn’t want was to see train passengers in danger or fires or whatever.”

The midpoint in the tunnel, marked with a bright yellow point median sign, really exists, Moll said, but the film crew did not venture all the way to the middle. “Once you are a few kilometres in, it all looks the same, so it was pointless to go into the middle. Especially when you suddenly have to pee; it is really problematic.”

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