It may have produced François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer and Louis Malle but on the small screen France has historically proved rather less illustrious. Its television industry was long equated with uninspired fiction, examining national obsessions or knock-offs of mediocre American programmes, reports The Guardian.
But, rather like the thick smoke that once choked the nation’s cafés, the noxious reputation of French TV production has largely dispersed. Driven by slick and successful series such as Les Revenants (The Returned), Engrenages (Spiral) and Les Hommes de l’Ombre (Spin), hip French programmes are attracting large international audiences – and creating an export surge.
“It’s part of a global trend that treats TV series more like mini-movies,” says Mathieu Béjot, executive director of TV France International, which helps promote the nation’s audiovisual output abroad. “The higher quality of writing, production and casting and greater diversity of topics involved in that, plays to France’s strong cinematic tradition.
“TV audiences everywhere have also become more open to foreign fiction when it’s compelling and authentic. A programme like Engrenages is great drama but it’s also so French you can almost smell the Gauloises.”
France is following US pay channels like HBO and Showtime – and more recently Netflix – in committing huge budgets to cinematic programming, such as The Wire or Homeland. In the UK this has helped produce international successes including Downton Abbey, Sherlock and Broadchurch.
In France the paid-for channel Canal Plus led the way in the mid-2000s by investing in new original series to supplement the fading allure of its football and cinema programming. The result, among other successes, was Spiral, which became an international hit.
Station TF1, public broadcaster France Télévisions and Franco-German channel Arte all followed suit and suddenly France was awash with series boasting cinematic appeal.
“We had conversations in the mid to late 2000s about how mind-blowing and innovative it was to see film directors taking series to a whole new level,” Alex Berger, co-producer of The Bureau told Variety this month. “We were influenced by stuff coming from the states such as The Wire, The Sopranos, The West Wing and House of Cards. We imported a new production technique into France for the series, based on a showrunner structure and a writing room.”
That project also involved another hallmark of many successful new series: luring bankable French film stars into TV. Spy thriller Le Bureau des Légendes (The Bureau) did that with leading actors Mathieu Kassovitz and Jean-Pierre Darroussin, while Spin features Nathalie Baye. Baron Noir, a new political drama that recently began on Canal Plus, contains some of France’s hottest movie draws in Kad Merad, Niels Arestrup and Anna Mougalis.