Series Mania, the biggest series festival in Europe, ended this Friday, March 25 by showing some nuggets and trends around a strong axis: the return to reality.
As for In therapythe psychological series with 53 million videos viewed on Arte.tv, there is a first and a second season in the world of series, just as there is a before and after Covid. In Therapy season 2 thus evokes a world emerging from confinement, with the health crisis in the background. The series will be visible on March 31 first on the Arte.tv platform then, from April 7, on the Arte channel, a sign of an order of priorities that has changed.
The impact of the health crisis
Judging by the catalog presented in Lille, at Séries Mania, the pandemic is not an obsession of screenwriters. But the real, yes! In Station Eleven, we do find an apocalyptic epidemic on HBO Max, but it is the story of the survivors of a devastating flu. A bit as if the authors were reluctant to deal with the Covid from which we all wish to escape.
As for medical series, we find on Canal+ a doctor full of humor with Ben Wishow, in This is going to hurtby Adam Kay for the BBC, but unlike Doctor House, it’s a doctor who crashes and cries in the locker room. Above all, he struggles with sleep to respond to the endless emergencies of the British public hospital. Reality goes beyond fiction and fiction is inspired more than ever by reality.
We see it with the series Funny by Fanny Herrero, the director of Ten percent, about the world of stand-up. But also from April 5 on OCS with Sentinels which deals with Operation Barkhane. The authors ofOne French villageThibault Valetoux and Frédéric Krivine, follow the daily life of young French soldiers tracking down Islamist terrorists in Mali.
Fiction-reality
A study by Glance/Nota has shown that in recent years, the big hits are called Callboys on gigolos in Belgium, Matar al padre which questions masculinity, taxi driversa Korean series about a secret society that wants to correct social injustice or the Brazilian Aruanaswhich shows environmental activists struggling with a mining company in the Amazon.
In Colombia, the promising Turbia is interested in the partition of a city between the rich who have access to water and the poor who are deprived of it. We can also quote the true story on Disney + of Malik Oussekinedied in France after a demonstration in 1986. Or The world of tomorrow on the birth of the Rap group NTM with Joey Star on Arte and Netflix.
But among the discoveries of Series Mania on fiction-reality, a remarkable production is announced with The Reportthe German series by Ben Von Rönne which tells the first six months of investigation after the assassination in Lebanon of Rafik Hariri in 2005.