From “HPI” to “Plus belle la vie”, the recipes of these much-loved French series

Some could not resist and rushed to the episodes available in preview on the Salto platform. Others are waiting for him behind their TV screen on May 12 around 9 p.m. She ? Morgane Alvaro, the heroine of the series HPI, which returns to TF1 for a second season. A year ago, during the broadcast of the first eight episodes, Audrey Fleurot made a splash by interpreting this broke child woman, a balaclava version northerner who likes nothing so much as tight tops and showy boots with vertiginous heels. But with an IQ of 160. Up to 12 million viewers have followed the misadventures of this former cleaning lady who, thanks to her extraordinary brain, has become a consultant for a team of police officers who are not always at the top. Only the Euro football and an intervention by Emmanuel Macron on confinement did better in 2021. If we want to find an equivalent score for a fiction, we have to go back fifteen years. In comparison, In therapythe first episode of the great success of the Arte channel, brought together “only” 2.5 million people.

When HPI explodes, another TV phenomenon is on the way to extinction. After 18 years of good and loyal service, More beautiful life, the daily soap opera of France 3, will stop in November. The channel announced this Thursday, May 5. More than enough audience (about 2.5 million viewers, against double in the good old days) and cruel lack of renewal in the plots. However, when it was launched in 2004, the product was as innovative as HPI. Far from polished series with elaborate scenarios Legends Office Where Ten percent, acclaimed by the CSP +, these two have been able to seduce widely in a universe where the offer is however plethoric. Their secret? The same ability to capture their time, just enough transgression to attract attention, but not so much as not to scare off an audience in search above all of popular entertainment.

More beautiful lifemore than a series, a social phenomenon

When More beautiful life settles in the daily life of the French a few months after its launch in 2004, it is almost by breaking and entering. Olivier Szulzynger, one of the first screenwriters behind the success of the soap opera, remembers the tipping point: “In general, when you work on TV, the people you meet vaguely know your program. There, at the end a few weeks, very quickly, my interlocutors asked me what was going to happen with such and such a character, they wanted scoops on the sequel. That had never happened to me. In the rise of the Accoules at the entrance to the Panier district in Marseille, we meet fans in search of the Mistral, the emblematic bar of the soap opera… which only exists in the studio. From simple “soap”, More beautiful life has become a social phenomenon, the subject of scientific books, research conferences and heated debates between fans on social networks. Thérèse is in her early sixties, she has been following the series since its inception. It is the moment of relaxation that she allows herself at the end of the day, sometimes with her husband whom she has succeeded in converting, less often with her daughters who find that “this is not the real reality” and kindly mock this passion. When she can’t be behind her screen, she makes up for it by replay. Same for the holidays. 18 years of loyalty that she claims: “I find that it traces the society in which we live. For example, a doctor who lives with a man or the atmosphere in hospitals.”

More beautiful life as HPI are series that stick to the spirit of the times and integrate it into their scenarios. On the Place du Mistral, over the years, we comment on the attacks of November 2015, the election of Emmanuel Macron, the death of Johnny Hallyday, the assassination of Samuel Paty, the victory of the French football team in the World Cup… The filming, close to the broadcast, allows the insertion of a short sentence, an allusion that anchors the episode in reality. Initially intended to rid viewers who skipped the television news to catch the soap opera at 8:20 p.m., these news pellets quickly became one of the soap opera’s hallmarks: I watch because it’s also real life.

In HPI, the references are more discreet, but the writers have chosen to portray a single mother of three children, drowned in debt. Problems that many viewers feel like they share in these times of difficult month-ends, expensive gas and rising pasta prices. Another resonance with the moment? The question of the climate, raised by this father concerned about degrowth, who chooses to leave the city to settle in a farm where he develops permaculture and creates an eco-responsible lodging. The screenwriters of HPI also had a tremendous intuition by surfing on a fashionable concept: yesterday’s gifted people who have become high intellectual potential (HPI). “It’s a notion in the air of time in cognitive and social sciences. We are not all looking at our children to find out if they are HPI, but it crosses a lot of families. Everyone can therefore identify with the magical behavior of the heroine. With the addition of a very contemporary humor”, underlines Nils C. Ahl, co-author of the TV series dictionary (ed. Philippe Rey) and director of Reboot for the Series Mania festival.

Transgressive compared to the television routine of the moment, these series know how to provoke a mirror effect with the viewer. Of course, no one recognizes themselves directly in an Audrey Fleurot equipped with golden “queen” earrings, XXL version, bursting huge bubbles of pink chewing gum. Of course, no one believes in her integration into a police station because she dropped a file while cleaning an office, knew in thirty seconds to detect the weak point of the investigation and solve it. It prevents. Who hasn’t dreamed of taking off their “little people” clothes to show the powerful and the authorities that you’re better than them? Who has not imagined that the common sense of “those from below” and “provincials” had as much weight as the brain juice of “those from above” or “Parisians”? We have an ordinary life, but we have potential: in these times of yellow vests, of questioning powers, the confidence and cheeky cheeks of Morgane Alvaro / Audrey Fleurot hit the mark. Like that of a Corinne Masiero in another successful series, Captain Marleaubroadcast on France 2. In all cases, a common point, underlined by Olivier Szulzynger: “These are atypical, dented characters, not very smooth statues.”

The reflection of French society

At its beginnings, More beautiful life played to the full on this phenomenon of identification. “Unlike French fictions which until then were based on a monolithic positive hero, we discover a choral fiction with characters of different characters, not always sympathetic, but living in the same neighborhood, a metaphorical reduction of French society “, recalls Jean-Yves Le Naour, historian and author, in 2013, of More beautiful life. The story box (PUF). Its location in Marseille, and not in Paris, does a lot for its apparent normality. For the first time or almost, many mixed couples are staged and the diversity of French society bursts onto the screen. “At one time, the soap opera was quite transgressive, with its first homosexual hero, the subjects of drugs or rape, sexual transition. It was very modern for a popular and young audience. to know, to see that we were not alone in experiencing certain things and to open up a dialogue with the parents”, recalls Philippe Thuillier, TV producer and connoisseur of this universe.

Pedagogical virtues that very few series can claim. Hugo Martinez, the creator of the association Hugo! who fights school bullying, appreciated that this subject was addressed there on several occasions: “Of course, there is scriptwriting, we are not always as close as possible to reality, but the awareness work is done. ” He, who is also high potential, is less convinced by the way in which HPI presents this question: “There is a daring bet and in the general interest of TF1 to choose to talk about it, but we could have avoided the “big child” side with lollipop in the mouth and outrageous dress code. But for these series, arousing debate, even criticism, is proof that they have entered the life of the French. Due to its seniority, More beautiful life was called to order on several occasions by the CSA, on episodes devoted to drugs or rape, then by the International Coalition for the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood (Ciams) which judged that the soap opera promoted surrogacy without distance or counterpoint.

The impact is all the stronger as these series bring together a large audience. A long time, More beautiful life was a transgenerational program, the grandmother watched it with her granddaughter, then the other members of the family joined in all the more easily since the soap opera was broadcast at dinner time. And even if in recent years, the youngest have deserted, partly explaining the drop in audience, More beautiful life remains the best-known series in France: 71% of them have already watched it, according to an Ifop poll for Point of September 2020. They are 59% for Captain Marleaubut only 35% for the Legends Office and 30% for dark baron. At the time of the survey, HPI had not yet been broadcast, but the audience achieved by season 1 suggests a family consumption of the program, in a universe where the attendance of screens is more and more fragmented and individualized.

In this spring of 2022, will the success of the first season be confirmed? Since the music of Pretty Woman will resonate to accompany the tribulations of Audrey Fleurot in the first episode of season 2, the leaders of the chain will have their eyes riveted on the hearings. The risk is great, in fact, of falling into excess and caricature, of breaking the fragile balance created by the character of Audrey Fleurot, a mixture of humor and tenderness. More beautiful life has already been a victim. By multiplying the intrigues too much, by “making everyone sleep with everyone else”, she ended up getting bored. And its DNA based on good feelings is less in tune with a society where social, political and identity tensions dominate. Finally, paradoxically, the incredible success of the series over the past few years brings it back a little more to the radius of the past, in favor of programs with a more modern image. “The series have become such a social phenomenon that we define ourselves by them: it’s: tell me what you watch, I’ll tell you who you are. It’s easier to assume watching Netflix than More beautiful life“, concludes Nils C. Ahl. Snobbery, when you hold us!