Special issue: French television then and now

The rationale behind this special issue of French Screen Studies emerged during the early months of the COVID-enforced lockdown, when I suddenly became aware of a vast treasure trove of French television series available on numerous streaming platforms. For the first time, I discovered Un village français/A French Village (France 3, 2009–2017), Plan cœur/The Hook Up Plan (Netflix, 2018–2022) and Marseille (Netflix, 2016–2018), but also smaller, niche-driven content such as Le Bazar de la charité/The Bonfire of Destiny (TF1/Netflix, 2019), Au service de la France/A Very Secret Service (Arte, 2015–2018), La Trêve/The Break (La Une/France 2/Netflix, 2016–2018) and Une chance de trop/No Second Chance (TF1, 2015). It seemed that an entire ecosystem was overflowing from these platforms, showcasing the vitality of French genre television through complex storytelling, stylistic visual flourishes and the appearance of familiar and new faces. It quickly became clear that the sheer volume of French television shows had increased over the last decade, and the proliferation of streaming platforms had – even before the surge in lockdown-induced viewing – played a key role in showcasing the diversity of these series, fostering in global audiences an openness to French long-form content and such programmes’ exposure around the world.

It is evident, then, that this large-scale content boom in recent years has granted professionals working in the French televisual space greater freedoms. Lionel Uzan, CEO of Federation Entertainment, the Paris-based pan-European production studio, remarked that these newly acquired professional opportunities had given ‘more scope for historical dramas, fantasy, horror and comedy […] alongside popular genres such as police procedurals and crime thrillers’, in large part owing to the ease with which creative talent could now ‘move between platforms and channels’ (Goodfellow 2021). These contemporary French television series were now part of a broader orchestrated manoeuvre to showcase France’s ability to compete alongside American and British quality television productions. And yet more seasoned viewers would have recognised that these ‘global’ series so lauded in the early 2020s were in fact part of the continuum of French television that dated back several decades.

French television: a brief history

Television’s increasingly significant presence in French cultural life over the last 60 years has instigated new programming policies, launched a diverse slate of genres and brought into sharp focus the vigorous interplay between cinematic and televisual codes. Both home-grown long-form television series and téléfilms [films made for television] have long been part of the French television landscape. It is worth remembering, for example, that the New Wave directors of the 1960s were deeply absorbed by the narrative and stylistic possibilities afforded by television. Eric Rohmer made nearly 30 programmes for French television in the 1960s on topics as diverse as the environment, architecture and Edgar Allan Poe – Jacob Leigh notes that all this material became ‘a blueprint for [Rohmer’s] later masterpieces’ (Leigh 2012, 7). In 1970, Agnès Varda was commissioned by ORTF (the Office de radiodiffusion-télévision française) to make a TV film about exiles from the military dictatorship in Greece living in France. While the resulting film – Nausicaa – was pulled from release and never broadcast, it paved the way for two other important made-for-TV works: the 1975 documentary Daguérreotypes, made for the German TV channel ZDF, and Agnès de ci de là Varda/Agnès Varda: From Here to There, screened over five consecutive nights on Arte in 2011. Florence Tissot, in her article in this issue dealing with Varda’s TV work, notes how television between the mid-1950s and the end of the 1970s effectively shaped the public’s image of Varda, framing her not just as a committed filmmaker and photographer but also as the wife of Jacques Demy and as a feminist. And nor should we forget that Jean-Luc Godard, whose pronouncements on television usually alternated between the caustic and the despairing, also worked in the medium.¹ His Le Gai Savoir/Joy of Learning (1969) was also a commission from ORTF to adapt Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, and with Anne-Marie Miéville he made the radical long-form works Six fois deux: sur et sous la communication/Six Times Two: Over and Under Communication (1976) and France tour détour deux enfants/France/Tour/Detour/Two Children (1977). His monumental Histoire(s) du cinéma/History(s) of the Cinema (1988–1998) was originally made for and financed by Canal+.

Marjolaine Boutet’s excellent overview of the history of French television pinpoints the 1970s as the ‘golden age’ of prestige television, with the release of costume dramas and heritage productions such as Les Boussardel (‘The Boussardels’) (ORTF Télévision 2, 1972), Les Gens de Mogador (‘The People of Mogador’) (ORTF Télévision 2, 1972–1973), Les Thibault (‘The Thibaults’) (ORTF Télévision 2, 1972–1973) and Les Rois maudits (‘The Accursed Kings’) (ORTF Télévision 2, 1972–1973). These series ‘became increasingly ambitious in their focus on historical frescoes [and] held their own against foreign rivals’ (Boutet 2014).² The longstanding popularity in France for romans policiers and crime fiction lay behind the commissioning of such series as Allô France/Hello France (ORTF Télévision 2, 1966–1970), Les Brigades du Tigre/The Tiger Brigades (France 2, 1974–1983) and Commissaire Moulin/Police Commissioner Moulin (TF1, 1976–1982; 1989–2008). Georges Simenon’s fictional detective Maigret, a frequent presence on film (La Nuit du carrefour/Night at the Crossroads [Jean Renoir, 1932], Les Caves du Majestic/Majestic Hotel Cellars [Richard Pottier, 1945] and Maigret tend un piège/Maigret Sets a Trap [Jean Delannoy, 1958]), was subsequently adapted for television. Jean Richard played him 88 times between 1967 and 1990 in Les Enquêtes du commissaire Maigret/Maigret Investigates (ORTF/Antenne 2), followed by Bruno Cremer between 1991 and 2005 for France 2’s series Maigret. The flagship policier Julie Lescaut (TF1, 1992–2014) served as a tonal and stylistic template for a new wave of female-led French detective series such as Capitaine Marleau (France 2/France 3, 2014–2021) and Astrid et Raphaëlle/Astrid: Murder in Paris (France 2, 2019–2023).³ This greater visibility of female representation on French television was substantiated by Burch and Sellier (2013) in their study of over 400 téléfilms broadcast on free-to-air channels in the 1990s and 2000s. This was a period in which a large number of family, workplace and domestic melodramas targeted a largely female national television audience and also offered emerging female television writers and directors significant professional opportunities.

So what we are seeing on French television in the 2010s and 2020s is in some ways not radically different at all from these aforementioned television successes. In its 1970s heyday, France competed with the UK as a main global exporter of television programmes (Nordenstreng and Varis 1974, 30), while between 1958 and 1992, French TV series and mini-series increased from just over 1% of total transmission time on domestic screens to nearly 24% (Favre 1999, 414).⁴ Now, just as then, by drawing in stars from the world of cinema and by shuttling between different genres, tones and time periods, France is positioning itself at the apex of an increasingly profitable, international televisual landscape in cutting-edge ways. This has been helped by local industrial circumstances which continue to impact domestic programming policies. Gaumont’s canny move in 2020 to license a number of its old television programmes and films to Netflix boosted its programming offerings. Moreover, according to Christopher Meir, it was the deliberate recalibration of StudioCanal’s film-backed projects in the mid-2010s, away from Anglophone film output and back towards more ‘local’ products serving its French market, that accounts for an increase in investment in prestige television drama.⁵ For Meir, ‘new streaming platforms […] growing international markets [and] changes in audience preferences [make] television drama more attractive for consumers, creative talents, and studios’ (2021, 324). What had changed was the sheer visibility of French television by global audiences through multiple subscription video on demand (SVOD) services. Living as we are through what Raymond Kuhn has called France’s ‘fourth age of television’ (i.e. ‘expansion in supply, hypercompetition among multiple content providers, segmentation […] audience fragmentation, and transnationalization’ (2021, 273), viewers are now instantly exposed to the nation’s TV patrimoine through SVOD’s reach and the flexible audio-visual policies of entertainment conglomerates.

This special issue thus seeks to diagram the current status of television in France, focus on some of the aesthetic, industrial and performative tensions at play and examine how the rise of prestige French television has brought about changes in storytelling practices. The popularity of French series over a sustained period in terms of audience figures, viewing percentages and (inter)national acclaim points to an emerging field of French audio-visual research in which television series need to be contextualised and investigated with the same rigour as French cinema. Lucy Mazdon first articulated this need for a televisual turn over two decades ago when she argued that for researchers of French audio-visual culture, ‘television should surely be a matter of great interest’, not least because, as cinematic production and exhibition were becoming increasingly interconnected with television, ‘it seems vital to study the two in tandem’ (2002, 242).

Home-grown talent

In 2012, four home-grown television series – Ainsi soient-ils/The Churchmen (Arte, 2012), Les Revenants/The Returned (Canal+, 2012–2015), Q.I. (‘IQ’) (OSC Max, 2012–2014) and Les Hommes de l’ombre/Spin (France 2, 2012–2016) – were released almost simultaneously across France. Each proved enormously popular with domestic audiences, and three were quickly sold to international television distributors.⁶ Later that year, seeking to account for this new-found enthusiasm for French TV series at home, Les Inrockuptibles interviewed producer Caroline Benjo. Her response was revealing:

I really feel that something is happening in France, and that we’re finally breaking free a bit. I’m meeting more and more young writers who have always been nourished by American series. I belong to a generation that was brought up on cinema; now it’s been replaced by another generation for whom series count as much as, if not more than, cinema – a generation with a highly sophisticated relationship to television. (Durand 2012)⁷

The new culture evolving in French television in 2012 seemed to bring together trends in audio-visual fiction production – auteurism, dense storytelling, less reliance on stars, a ‘made in France’ twist on contemporary European television output and, above all, the emergence of a highly teleliterate generation of French talent. If this new-found critical admiration for French television series did not quite represent ‘a new wave’, it was at least, concluded Les Inrockuptibles, ‘a kind of resurrection’ (Durand 2012).⁸ Subsequently, a Médiamétrie study published in October 2013 confirmed the rise in popularity of such television series as Les Revenants and Les Hommes de l’ombre in France and supported the view that the industry’s broader pivot towards a ‘quality television’ programming model was proving highly effective: by now, nearly three-quarters of domestic audiences were regularly watching a French TV series, up from two-thirds in 2011, while nearly 70% were watching more than one a week (up from 60% a year earlier). This intensification was remarked upon by Bruce Crumley, who excitedly reported in The Guardian that ‘hip French programmes are attracting large international audiences – and creating an export surge’ (2016). Driven by the recent success of Engrenages/Spiral (Canal+, 2005–2020) and the imminent releases of Le Bureau des légendes/The Bureau (Canal+, 2015–2020) and Baron Noir (Canal+, 2016–2020), the global popularity of French television was on an upward, and lucrative, trajectory. As an export industry, French television brought in around €70 million in 2016, as the aforementioned trio alongside the likes of Braquo (Canal+, 2000–2016), Mafiosa, le clan/Mafiosa (Canal+, 2006–2014) and the Franco-British coproduction Tunnel/The Tunnel (Sky Atlantic/Canal+, 2013–2018) began turning up on primetime TV slots across Europe, Australia and the US. Crumley’s conclusion – that ‘the noxious reputation of French TV production has largely dispersed’ (2016) – suggested that the trajectory of French television policy was a long way off spiking.

The enduring status in France of cinema – and the film d’auteur in particular – as the marker of cultural refinement and the defining audio-visual feature of national identity was, it seemed, imperceptibly slipping. The Lille-based Series Mania festival quickly grew to become Europe’s biggest industry gathering dedicated uniquely to television series. In April 2016, the then French minister of culture Audrey Azoulay announced that a Festival International des Séries – essentially the television equivalent of the Cannes Film Festival – would take place each year with the aim of promoting French series and brokering international co-production deals. Azoulay concluded her announcement by stating that ‘in the space of just a few years, the television series has become a major genre, a creative outlet as rich as it is diverse’ (2016), a clue to the new-found conspicuousness of television within France’s cultural heritage.⁹

As Caroline Benjo had indicated back in 2012, many of the French writers on these new series were as much influenced by the auteur approach to television that had been flourishing in America since the late 1990s as by any allegiance to French art-house style.¹⁰ The arrival on French primetime schedules of American series such as CSI (CBS 2000–2015), ER (NBC, 1994–2009) and 24 (Fox, 2001–2010) in the early 2000s was a major turning point in the development of French television. Audience expectations were rapidly changing, and French television series began to deftly respond ‘by reconstituting themselves as a form that was more “choral” in nature, on the model of ensemble shows’ (Soulez 2015, 109). Fabrice de La Patellière, former head of fiction at Canal+, wrote recently of ‘a new generation of directors in France who are just as influenced by series as they are by films’ (Leffler 2023). Equally, Eric Rochant has praised contemporary US television, holding up The Wire (HBO, 2002–2008) and The Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007) as exemplars of the types of television series the French should seek to emulate (2017, 22).¹¹ It is noticeable that this attempt to mimic the American model complicates France’s established relationship to television as a cultural product. As Boutet reminds us, the potential for episodic drama was initially overlooked by executives at Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (RTF), the French national public broadcaster from 1949 to 1964 (2014). Early serials such as Agence Nostradamus/The Nostradamus Agency (1950) and Les Aventures de Télévisius/The Adventures of Televisius (1949–1953) were often shot surreptitiously over the summer in RTF’s deserted Cognac-Jay studios in Paris and usually ran for no more than 15 minutes per episode. It was only in the second half of the 1960s, when ORTF gained a second channel, that the early reluctance to embrace serialised television series began to shift and a more ambitious programming policy was operationalised.

The industrial contours were, then, quickly shifting. Despite a hitherto adversarial relationship with French film producers who feared the streaming platform would squeeze out independent producers, disrupt the theatrical model around which the entire French film ecosystem was built and pose an existential threat to the nation’s firmly ringfenced cultural exception [exception culturelle], Netflix launched in France in 2014. Netflix has been labelled the ‘dominant challenger to linear television, viewing practices, nationalised media systems and established concepts of what television is’ (Jenner 2018, 23). Such disruptive values would hardly appear compatible with France’s top-down interventionism and strict ‘window timeline’ distribution patterns that lie at the heart of its audio-visual policy. Moreover, given France’s precarious relationship with Netflix – dating back at least to the moment the title card of Bong Joon-ho’s Netflix-produced Okja premiere was booed at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival – it was a surprise how quickly Netflix became so entrenched in the domestic cultural landscape. Within 18 months of launching, it had released Marseille, starring Gérard Depardieu – the first French-produced series on the streaming service, and one of 24 French productions made by the company between 2014 and 2019.¹² Since that ‘economic landslide’ (Poitte 2019), France has rapidly grown to become one of Netflix’s largest foreign investment markets, and the company has accelerated output, producing nine domestic series (including 13 novembre : Fluctuat nec mergitur/November 13: Attack on Paris [Netflix, 2018], La Révolution [Netflix, 2020] and Family Business [Netflix, 2019–2021]).¹³ In 2020, Netflix opened new production offices in Paris and immediately announced a new slate of 20 ‘French only’ productions. At the time of writing, there are nearly 7 million subscribers to the platform nationally. When Lupin (Netflix, 2021–2023), starring Omar Sy as a modern-day version of Maurice Leblanc’s gentleman thief, was watched over 76 million times in its first month of release, it became Netflix’s second most-watched show of all time, behind only Bridgerton (Netflix, 2020–2023) (Porter and McClintock 2021).¹⁴ If the reception by several French critics to Netflix’s output remained frosty (for example, Sandrine Bajos’s review of La Révolution – ‘It gets boring too quickly. Weighed down by a host of clichés, overblown narrative ploys and a disjointed script, the plot struggles to engage us’ [2020]¹⁵ – remains symptomatic still of much of the critical discourse around contemporary French television drama), the initial coolness towards Netflix’s arrival in France in the mid-2010s had now been replaced by a cautious attentisme. Netflix’s announcement that it was co-financing a major restoration of Abel Gance’s Napoléon/Napoleon (1927) – originally scheduled for 2021 but now delayed until at least 2023 – was followed by an agreement signed in 2020 with MK2 to distribute around 50 of the exhibitor’s 800-film back catalogue. As a cultural charm offensive, Netflix’s actions seemed deliberately engineered to appease nervous French cinephiles.

David Pettersen has observed that in the age of quality long-form television, French series ‘have become a site of intense genre experimentation’ (2021, 252). By offering a visual and formal counterpoint to international – and particularly American series – these genre-inflected programmes have proved enormously popular. The success of policiers such as Engrenages, Braquo and the spy series Le Bureau des légendes in France and abroad points to an increasingly dynamic overlap between film and television, with renowned French actors, writers and directors working productively in both media. French television has also successfully interfaced with other ‘cinematic’ genres – horror (Les Revenants), history (Versailles, Canal+, 2015–2018) and the political thriller (Baron Noir). Earlier comedy TV sketch series such as Service après-vente des émissions (‘After-sales Service of Shows’) (Canal+, 2005–2012) and Un gars, une fille/A Guy, A Girl (France 2, 1999–2003) had already introduced now well-established stars Sy and Jean Dujardin.

Newer faces from television, such as Camille Cottin (Pep’s [TF1, 2013-2015] and Connasse/The Parisian Bitch [Canal+, 2013-2015]), Audrey Fleurot (Kaamelott [M6, 2005-2009] and Engrenages [Canal+, 2005-2020]) and Laure Calamy (Dix pour cent/Call My Agent! [France 2, 2015-2020]) were now emerging, and would eventually, like Sy and Dujardin, become highly acclaimed film actors.

The global phenomenon of Dix pour cent in particular exemplifies the practices of contemporary French television authorship. Set in a Parisian talent agency, the series uses famous guest stars (such as Isabelle Huppert, Juliette Binoche and Jean Dujardin) to play fictional versions of themselves, a tactic that generates diegetic comic tension and wider metatextual reflections on the nature of celebrity. The temporary migration from film to television by these actors reflects the porous borders between the two visual formats and the changing audio-visual landscape in France. This relocation to television by traditional film actors is itself fascinating, and points to new ways of reading and contextualising stardom, performance and acting style. One way to read these new professional trajectories is to intuit them as individual responses to a new crisis of celebrity: the television format allows traditional film stars to demystify their image at a time when they are competing with newer, more accessible types of stars from reality TV and the Internet.¹⁶

Guillaume Soulez has detected a further by-product of the rise in quality of French television: the revitalisation of auteur cinema and ‘the encouragement and accentuation of a certain return of psychological realism and social preoccupations’ (Soulez 2015, 112). Two of France’s most acclaimed auteurs – Bruno Dumont and Olivier Assayas – have used the TV mini-series format to experiment with the metaphysical murder mystery (P’tit Quinquin/Li’l Quinquin, Arte, 2014) and biopic (Carlos/Carlos the Jackal, Canal+, 2010) respectively. More recently, Assayas has written and directed the 2022 eight-part miniseries Irma Vep, based on his earlier 1996 film, for HBO.¹⁷

Following Dumont’s and Assayas’s lead, a new generation of directors in France was evolving, influenced as much by television as film, and comfortable pivoting between the different aesthetic demands and scheduling logistics of the two media.¹⁸ Where once French television was considered ‘unsophisticated, formulaic and risk-averse’ (Anon 2020, 76) – the ‘safe’, ideologically neutral alternative to France’s dynamic, globally recognised film d’auteur identity – a remarkable turnaround was now underway. The period between 1990 and 2010 was marked by a growing mutual interdependence of television and cinema, both at the audience level and in terms of mobile personnel seeking new forms of collaboration. Cultural hierarchies that had historically existed between French cinema and television were gradually breaking down. Even before the remarkably successful Dix pour cent was released in 2015 (broadcast first on France 2, and then streamed globally by Netflix from 2019), France’s televisual patrimoine was a fertile space worth exploring with the same rigour as French cinema. Post-Dix pour cent, the release of shows like Braqueurs/Ganglands (Netflix, 2021), Détox/Off the Hook (Netflix, 2022) and Drôle/Standing Up (Netflix, 2022) suggests that the televisual turn first anticipated by Mazdon, in terms of aesthetics, genre, and narrative, as well as industrial and audience perspective, was becoming all the more pervasive.

Narrative complexity in French television – Engrenages and Canal+

To navigate contemporary French television practice means a return to Jason Mittel’s landmark essay ‘Narrative Complexity in American Television’ (2006). Here, Mittel identified a new paradigm of television storytelling characterised by ‘narrative complexity’, which he defined as:

a redefinition of episodic forms under the influence of serial narration – not necessarily a complete merger of episodic and serial forms but a shift in balance. Rejecting the need for plot closure within every episode that typifies conventional episodic forms, narrative complexity foregrounds ongoing stories across a range of genres […] allowing relationship and character drama to emerge from plot development (32).

For Mittel, this mode of storytelling set series such as Lost, The Wire and The Sopranos apart from traditional television output because of their narrative experimentation and complex storytelling innovations. One factor in the rise of narrative complexity was the enticement of feature film makers like David Lynch and Barry Levinson into the televisual space – the key drawcard here was the possibility of far greater creativity in terms of ‘extended character depth, ongoing plotting, and episodic variations’ (31). Mittel also noted how much of contemporary television storytelling included what he terms the ‘narrative special effect’: those moments of high drama which ‘push the operational aesthetic to the foreground, calling attention to the constructed nature of the narration and asking us to marvel at how the writers pulled it off’ (35). In other words, audiences were engaging more fully in contemporary television narration as a form of spectacle, admiring its interconnected plotlines and intricate world-building. Mittel’s ideas are worth quoting at length here because they showcase how gradual shifts in the US television industry at an institutional and technological level have in turn permeated the formal and stylistic characteristics of the medium at the French local level. The concept of ‘narrative complexity’ encapsulates what French television executives, writers and directors have been seeking to match over the last two decades – the assembling of prestige, long-form programming that placed great emphasis on season-long story arcs and multi-protagonist character development.

The full-scale emergence of narratively complex, contemporary long-form French television can be traced back to the release of crime drama Engrenages (2005–2020). While the gritty Danish crime series Forbrydelsen/The Killing (DR1, 2007–2012) is often credited with kickstarting the global trend of ‘Nordic noir’, it is worth pointing out that Engrenages premiered two years earlier. Featuring strong female characters, corrupt police officers, lawyers and judges, ruthless criminals and a gritty, hard-edged tone, it was routinely referred to as France’s answer to The Wire (still, for many, the ne plus ultra of twenty-first-century quality long-form television). Angelique Chrisafis’s slightly overstated claim that ‘Quite simply, Spiral saved French TV’ (2011) nonetheless speaks to the acceleration of French prestige television that occurred post-Engrenages. The series typifies French long-form television practice via its narrative intricacy, controversial themes and high production values. Its eight seasons were exhibited in over 70 countries, and after winning the International Emmy Award for Best Series in 2015, Engrenages has come to epitomise the idea of European prestige television. As Phil Powrie notes in his article in this issue on the use of music in Engrenages, it was the series’s reliance on overarching storytelling that laid out a model for subsequent French policiers such as Les Témoins/Witnesses (France 2, 2014–2017) and Le Bureau des légendes to duplicate.

Engrenages was produced by Canal+, whose pioneering commissioning of original French television series has successfully positioned the organisation at the summit of quality television drama in the Hexagon. Founded in 1984, Canal+ was initially created as a response to the French government’s desire to develop pay television in France and offer high-quality programming to its subscribers. From the mid-2000s, Canal+ deliberately set out to mimic the American pay TV network HBO’s business model of developing innovative, gritty television series that did not shy away from exploring contemporary issues or offering intricately chronicled overlapping narratives. Described by Bruno Icher as ‘a kind of French HBO, [a] machine that, like her American big sister, assembles bold series, in a formal break from typical French productions’ (Icher 2010),¹⁹ Canal+, under the leadership of de La Patellière, developed narrative forms and structures that would soon become industry-wide standards (such as 42- and 52-minute episodes, organised into seasons of 8 to 25 episodes). It invested heavily in producing original content, and the resultant series – Engrenages, Braquo (2009–2016), Maison close (‘Brothel’) (Canal+, 2010–2013) and Le Bureau des légendes – garnered international acclaim. For Soulez, these manoeuvres signify ‘a new alliance between new American serial narrative forms and auteur cinema’ in an explicitly French context (2015, 111).

The historical drama series Versailles (2015–2018), set during the early reign of Louis XIV, was also produced by Canal+. Despite the controversial decision to have all of the characters speak in English, the fact that a French-backed series used English as its principal language suggested a softening of the exception culturelle and broader strategic plans at Canal+ in terms of commercial imperatives within the Anglosphere. By offering foreign audiences a highly stylised – and anglicised – vision of the French historical past, Versailles, with its high production values, glossy, heritage-style aesthetic and creative reimagining of French history, sits alongside other ‘present-in-the-past’ historical dramas created by Canal+ such as Maison close and Marie Antoinette (2022–2023) that challenge traditional historical discourse, subvert stable versions of history and explore contemporary issues through a historical lens.²⁰

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that French television had never been interested in imbricating ‘narrative complexity’ into its television output prior to Engrenages. Soulez pinpoints two key moments in recent French television practice that foreshadow its current global appeal. The first was the broadcast over two consecutive nights on TF1 in January 1993 of two 90-minute episodes of Yves Boisset’s L’Affaire Seznec (‘The Seznec Affair’). Based on the famous 1920s court case and using actors more associated with prestige French cinema than prime-time television (such as Christophe Malavoy, Jean Yanne and Madeleine Robinson), Boisset’s téléfilm kickstarted a wave of big-budget television shows that either recreated historical events or adapted classics of French literature. This emergence of proto-prestige television (often featuring well-known stars drawn from cinema) ‘sought to combine the artistic and cultural aura of cinema with the audience and resources of television’ (Soulez 2015, 104). Notable examples of this trend include Josée Dayan’s four-part miniseries Le Comte de Monte Cristo/The Count of Monte Cristo (TF1, 1998) and Les Misérables (TF1, 2000), both starring Depardieu.²¹ An additional consequence of this industrial crossover between film and television would be the subsequent circulation of comic actors such as Alain Chabat, Kad Merad and Sy from French television to French cinema and back again. The broad popular appeal of these actors revitalised the international prestige and exportability of French comedy films.

Secondly, Soulez cites the founding of the Franco-German public television channel Arte in 1992 as instrumental in bolstering the sustainability of French auteur-driven cinema and embracing innovative formal experimentation across its output through its commitment to promoting artistic expression (2015, 98). Films such as Marius et Jeannette/Marius and Jeannette (Robert Guédiguian, 1997), Beau travail (‘Good Work’) (Claire Denis, 1999) and Lady Chatterley (Pascale Ferran, 2006) were co-produced by Arte and pointed to renewed reciprocity between television and cinema. We might also add to this by noting how François Mitterrand’s government – led by culture minister Jack Lang – introduced the concept of open competition in television in 1982. This led to the emergence of privately owned television channels such as Canal+, but also TF1 and M6, who were able to challenge the state monopoly, continue the transformation of television from a minor cultural form to a mass medium (continuing a process that had begun in the 1960s) and offer vigorous programming policies that led to an increased competition for audiences throughout the 1980s.

The rise of the showrunner

One of the more fascinating aspects of the resurgence of French television practice has been its appeal to auteurs who have migrated from the domestic film industry. By allowing creative teams to work with bigger budgets and develop more ambitious story arcs, the long-form storytelling of French television has enticed writers, directors and stars to cross once clearly defined lines.²² This gradual implementation by French television executives of a US-style approach to domestic practice – disaggregated content, high production values, an agile response to the disruptions of streaming and funding models – has been most notable in their adoption of the role of the showrunner.

In 2015, to coincide with the release of Le Bureau des légendes on Canal+, Clémentine Gallot interviewed Eric Rochant, the series creator, under the revealing by-line – ‘Je supervise tout’ [‘I oversee everything’]. Gallot (2015) noted that ‘the American-style showrunner is gradually making inroads into the creative process of French series’.²³ Recognising that France lacked the agility of its European counterparts when it came to mounting a counterattack against the emergence of American streaming platforms on the domestic television landscape, Rochant – hitherto best known for directing intimate films such as Un monde sans pitié/Love Without Pity (1989) and Aux yeux du monde/In the Eyes of the World (1991) – called for a reconfiguration of France’s television landscape and the promotion of the writer to the overall artistic and narrative direction of the series around a new figure, the auteur-producteur, or showrunner. In other words, the showrunner was now the individual responsible for overseeing the creative and day-to-day aspects of the television series. Tasked with ensuring consistency between the writing and production stage and dismantling the hitherto often unwieldy writer-director-producer triangle, Rochant would emerge as one of French television’s first showrunners, playing a critical role in shaping the overall direction and vision of Le Bureau des légendes, making important decisions about storytelling, production and style. Other showrunners such as Frédéric Krivine (Un village français) and Anne Landois (Engrenages) were likewise increasingly being credited as the auteurs for their respective series – driving forces that maintained creative control and narrative quality over multiple seasons. Their role in programming strategy was also crucial – in the case of Rochant, he was able to convince Canal+ to commit to producing series of Le Bureau des légendes annually (up to that point, this had never been done before). Rochant, Krivine and Landois now fitted into a category of TV professionals identified by Jason Mittell as storytellers who ‘embrace the broader challenges and possibilities for creativity in long-form series, as extended character depth, ongoing plotting, and episodic variations are simply unavailable options within a two-hour film’ (2006, 31). The importance of the narrative – ahead of, say, the presence of recognisable or familiar actors – compounds a series’s authorial vision and consistency. The long-form standard that French television has now adopted affords writers the opportunity to develop multi-character network narratives that evolve over time. Ultimately, by conceptualising the TV showrunner as an auteur, Rochant and others have smoothed over the disruptions to traditional programming infrastructure heralded by the arrival of Netflix (which, since 2021, has been joined in France by Amazon, Disney+ and Apple TV). These auteurs-producteurs now capitalise on the mode of delivery (i.e. streaming) to create prestige work that is precision engineered to compete with European, and especially US, series.

This growing importance of the showrunner in French television thus sheds light on the complex interplay between television authorship and creative control and collaboration and bridges the constraints and freedoms of the televisual form vis à vis the cinema. Creating a series that may run over several years demands a very different procedure to working within the circumscribed time limits of film production. Staffing patterns, a rotating crew of directors and the dynamic of the ‘writers’ room’ set contemporary French television apart from the more segmented phases of film pre-production and filming: at its heart, the showrunner embodies both production and creation and sets the coordinates for French television to stay competitive in the international television market.

Reflections on French television

It is hoped that the diversity of articles in this special issue of French Screen Studies will help kickstart new debates about television’s ongoing creativity, its genre overlapping and global exportability, and its elevated status alongside both popular and art-house French cinema as a vector of national cultural identity. Each article speaks to certain standalone as well as overlapping concerns. The first two, by Florence Tissot and Will Visconti, deal with women’s historiographies, gendered changes in the industry and the (in)visibility of female agency, while the fact that narrative fragments of Osmosis (Netflix, 2019) – analysed at length by Paul Scott – have subsequently been appropriated and reworked into US and UK series Soulmates (2020) and The One (2021), respectively, neatly highlights the exportability and generic flexibility of much of French genre television of the last decade outlined earlier in this editorial. Tissot’s ‘Agnès Varda : la cinéaste de la Nouvelle Vague vue par le petit écran’ is particularly relevant in this discussion of television because it not only demonstrates the overlaps between film and television that have been in play since the 1950s, but also recalls how prolific Varda was throughout her early career in particular in terms of television output. Tissot also looks at the ways in which French television forged a problematic gendered image of Agnès Varda, systematically associating the director with the reductive figure of woman, mother, wife and grandmother. Tissot focuses on the early development and spread of television in France – happening at the same time as Varda’s own career was emerging, firstly in documentary and then feature film – and the way in which the medium served to minimise Varda’s role within the New Wave. Varda’s short films were often shown in magazine-style programmes clearly aimed at a female audience, such as Aujourd’hui Madame/Today, Madame and Dim Dam Dom. By using Varda as a case study, Tissot illustrates the ongoing difficulty of French female directors in the twenty-first century to affirm their work and raises questions about the role and impact television can have on the career of an artist. What is doubly interesting in terms of Tissot’s article is to see how gendered terrain in France’s television industry has shifted quite profoundly, from Varda’s invisibility and marginalisation during the formative years of her career to Fanny Herrero’s current privileged status as lead showrunner on Dix pour cent and Drôle.²⁴

Visconti’s ‘Myth, memory and Maison close: representing sex work on screen’ surveys the representation of sex work on screen in the Canal+ ‘present-in-the-past’ series Maison close. Visconti argues that the maison close, given its presence in multiple examples of nineteenth-century art and literature, is a form of both lieu de mémoire and a lieu d’oubli [‘space of memory’ and ‘space of forgetting’].²⁵ Set in 1870s Paris, the series reflects a fascination with sex work in popular culture and offers a commentary on the legal standing of sex work between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. For Visconti, Maison close offers a more nuanced vision of history than simply categorising sex workers as either victim, criminal or femme fatale, informed by abolitionist debates during its production and emerging critiques of the Nordic Model of sex work. Visconti also charts the series’s move from exploitation to collective action and its efforts to increase the agency of its central sex worker characters. Visconti observes, too, that because Maison close proposes solutions to current issues enclosed within historical fiction, its creators deploy the past to hold up a mirror to contemporary French society.

In ‘“On n’est pas dans Black Mirror”: ambivalent optimism in Osmosis’, Paul Scott turns his attention to Osmosis (2019), the second French television series to be commissioned by Netflix after Marseille. Set in a near-future Paris, the eight-part series has often been likened to Black Mirror (Channel 4/Netflix, 2011–2019). For Scott, such parallels are awkward, given that Osmosis does not feature the underlying technophobia that characterises the UK series and is largely optimistic about the implications of artificial intelligence and technological advances. However, both Osmosis and Black Mirror are jointly concerned with critiquing certain excesses of late capitalism. In its blend of dystopian and utopian elements and allusions to and subversions of Anglophone science-fiction conventions, Scott argues that Osmosis is a highly ambivalent French take on artificial intelligence and both a utopian and dystopian vision of a projected future.

Phil Powrie begins ‘Hearing the music of Engrenages’ with the observation that very little academic work has been done on music in television series, and none at all examining French series. Taking Engrenages as his focal point – with music composed by Stéphane Zidi – Powrie argues that that music, for television series, frequently functions to shape audience perception of the characters. By listening closely to the series’s complex gamelan cues and piano themes, which often swing from one character to another across Engrenages’s eight seasons, Powrie shows how these modifications anticipate and reveal the narrative arc of its main character, Laure Berthaud (Caroline Proust), in turn stressing her rejection of the conflicting roles of mother and DPJ capitaine.

Finally, David Pettersen’s ‘From Bron to The Tunnel: localising international television formats’ analyses the Franco-British series The Tunnel co-produced by Sky Atlantic and StudioCanal, as an iteration of the Swedish-Danish series The Bridge/Bron/Broen (SVT1/DR1, 2011–2018). Pettersen argues that The Tunnel is best understood as a ‘localised version’ rather than a remake or an adaptation in part because it offers a readymade co-production template in industrial, linguistic and narrative terms through its focus on crimes on and around national borders. The article also engages with the complexities of situating The Tunnel within a nation-centred approach to French television.

TV: where the popular and the auteur converge

As Meir provocatively concludes in Mass Producing European Cinema: Studiocanal and its Works, his timely study of the increasing status of television in and as European audio-visual cultural production, ‘we may be at a tipping point in which film becomes of decreasing importance to all studios going forward’ (2019, 213). Certainly, the influx of Netflix, Amazon, Disney+ and Apple TV+ has enabled French showrunners to develop network-style, complex storytelling practices, often set against the backdrop of France’s differing photogenic landscapes. Perhaps it is no longer counterintuitive for us to think of French ‘auteur television’, as this continued upsurge of prestige television in France will only further enhance its audio-visual identity. Indeed, television has frequently allowed ‘the two poles of French cinema [i.e. auteur and popular] to be reconciled’ (Soulez 2015, 112) precisely because the formal and visual parameters of contemporary long-form television cut across such cinematic concepts as genre, stardom and authorship, at the same time as it entices audiences for auteur-driven, prestige films to migrate to similar stories on the small screen. Jason Mittel frames the US series Lost (ABC, 2004–2010) as an example of quality television based on four successfully achieved aesthetic norms: ‘unity of purpose, forensic fandom, narrative complexity and aesthetics of surprise – suggesting that these aspects account for much of the show’s value’ (Mittell 2009, 128). These norms are particularly appropriate, it seems to me, when applied to current French television practice, in which connected plots, active and engaged spectatorship, complex storytelling and high production values work together to revitalise the medium and the message. Streamers like Netflix will henceforth play an even more significant role in the European cinema industry owing to new regulations in effect since 2021 that require them to reinvest a percentage of their revenues in European content. Just as Canal+ has slowly helped bridge the gap between film and television in the Hexagon since 1984, reshaping in particular the development of French comedy through its innovative financing and distribution models, so too might the current presence of SVOD services in France serve as a catalyst for innovation and experimentation.

I began this editorial by expressing my hope that, by highlighting some of the trends, types and techniques in current French TV series, other scholars would subsequently engage with the abundance of France’s contemporary television output. The relationship in France today between cinema and television – often one that has ‘traditionally been fraught’ (Harrod 2021, 286) – now appears rich in possibility, from diverse industrial, economic and aesthetic angles. The five articles here each reflect upon television’s role in encapsulating or exporting particular aspects of Frenchness, interrogate notions of authorship and genre and demonstrate how narrative boundaries are frequently (re)negotiated. A closer examination of television series, the various genres and stars they deploy and their position within a global media industry can usefully build upon, nuance and reframe current work in French film studies.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ben McCann

Ben McCann is Associate Professor of French Studies at the University of Adelaide. He is the co-editor of Michael Haneke: Europe Utopia (Columbia University Press, 2011) and Framing French Culture (Adelaide University Press, 2015) and the author of Ripping Open the Set: French Film Design, 1930–1939 (Peter Lang, 2013), Le Jour se lève (I. B. Tauris, 2013), Julien Duvivier (Manchester University Press, 2017), The Spanish Apartment: European Youth on Film (Routledge, 2018) and, with Peter Pugsley, The Cinematic Influence: Interaction and Exchange Between the Cinemas of France and Japan (Bloomsbury, 2022).

Notes

1. Godard famously noted that ‘TV is like a tap: when you turn it on, if the water is pure, it’s fine, but if it’s poisoned, everyone is contaminated’ (‘La télé c’est comme un robinet, quand tu l’ouvres, si l’eau est pure, ça va, mais si elle est empoisonnée, tout le monde est contaminé’) (in Lagrange 2005, 243).

2. ‘deviennent de plus en plus ambitieuses [et] soutiennent vaillamment la comparaison avec leurs concurrentes étrangères.’

3. Josée Dayan, who has had an exceptionally prolific career in French television dating back to the mid-1970s, directed seven episodes of 101 of Julie Lescaut, and all 29 episodes of Capitaine Marleau (France 2/France 3, 2014–2023). US-imported police procedurals have also been part of the French television landscape for many years, predominantly through shows such as Les Experts : Miami/CSI: Miami (CBS, 2002–2012) and New York section criminelle/Law & Order: Criminal Intent (NBC, 2001–2011). For more on the popularity of these franchises in France, see Sellier (2015). It is worth noting here too that Paris enquêtes criminelles/Paris Criminal Investigations (TF1, 2007–2008) was a French-language adaptation that borrowed story arcs from the first three seasons of Law & Order: Criminal Intent and transposed the action from New York to Paris.

4. I am grateful to Mary Harrod for drawing Nordenstreng and Varis’s work to my attention.

5. StudioCanal refers to the film production company; Canal+ is the television network.

6. Les Revenants, for example, was sold to over 70 countries, and would later be remade – less successfully – as The Returned (2015) in America. In France, the first season of Les Revenants was watched by nearly 1.5 million spectators per episode, the highest viewing figures for a French series on French TV up to that point (for more on Les Revenants, see Pettersen 2021). Eric Rochant’s Le Bureau des légendes has fared even better – it was sold to 112 territories within months of its Canal+ debut in 2015 and is currently being remade for US audiences as The Department, directed by George Clooney. At the time of writing, Q.I. has not yet been distributed internationally.

7. ‘Je sens bien qu’il se passe quelque chose en France, et qu’enfin on se libère un peu. Je rencontre de plus en plus de jeunes auteurs nourris depuis toujours par la série américaine. J’appartiens à une génération qui a été éduquée par le cinéma ; désormais remplacée par une autre pour laquelle la série compte autant, voire plus que le cinéma, avec un rapport à la télé très sophistiqué.’

8. ‘une nouvelle vague’, ‘un genre de résurrection.’

9. ‘la série est devenue en quelques années un genre majeur, un espace de création aussi riche que diversifié.’

10. Alex Berger, the Franco-American producer of Le Bureau des légendes, noted in 2016 that: ‘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. We were influenced by stuff coming from the States such as The Wire, The Sopranos, The West Wing and House of Cards’ (Dale 2016).

11. Rochant described the creativity of those series ‘bien plus audacieuse que la plupart des films de leur époque’ [‘far more audacious than most films of the period’]. He also praised ‘l’incroyable force narrative’ [‘the incredible narrative force’] of Mad Men (AMC, 2007–2015) (2017, 22).

12. Marseille was excoriated by French critics. This review in Télérama is fairly indicative of the response: ‘C’est une débandade artistique, un raté industriel pour Netflix, sans doute son premier navet “maison”, qu’on découvre d’abord surpris, puis consterné, enfin hilare face à la pauvreté de son scénario, l’indigence de ses dialogues, la lourdeur de sa mise en scène et la faiblesse de son interprétation’ [‘It’s an artistic debacle, an industrial failure for Netflix, undoubtedly its first in-house turkey. We start off surprised, then dismayed, and finally end up in hysterics at the poor script, feeble dialogue, ponderous direction and weak performances’] (Langlais 2016).

13. ‘glissement de terrain économique’ (Poitte 2019).

14. Melanie Goodfellow (2021) highlights another Netflix-sponsored initiative that will further cement the company’s presence in Paris: all students at La Fémis film school are now offered the chance in their third year to develop a pilot for a television series and then pitch it to Netflix executives.

15. ‘On s’ennuie trop vite. Alourdie par de nombreux clichés, des ficelles trop grosses et un scénario décousu, l’intrigue peine à nous embarquer.’

16. Cédric Klapisch, producer and occasional director of the first season of Dix pour cent confirms this shift: ‘When we were making Call My Agent […] there were many people who said to me “no, I don’t do TV” […] We don’t hear that sentence anymore. Today, no actor would refuse to film a series.’ (Leffler, 2023).

17. On making Carlos for television, Assayas told Vanity Fair that ‘it was really exciting to dive into a genre that I had never really practiced. I had no idea what the rules were. I had no idea how I should approach it. I invented my own way of making a series’ (Desta 2022). Way back in 1992, Assayas had stated in an interview with Guy Ménard that television ‘is the great evil of our century – it’s impersonal, it’s empty, it’s absent’ (‘la télévision est le grand mal de notre siècle, c’est l’impersonnel, le vide, l’absence’ Ménard 1992, 28).

18. Fabrice de La Patellière states that it was Assayas’s Carlos that ‘warmed up French directors to the idea of making TV’ (Leffler 2023). Other French directors who have subsequently created, written and directed well-received US TV series include Louis Leterrier (The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance [Netflix, 2019]), Julie Delpy (On the Verge [Canal +, 2021]), and Julia Ducournau (Servant [Apple TV+, 2019-2012]).

19. ‘une sorte de HBO à la française, [une] machine à fabriquer, comme le fait sa grande sœur américaine, des séries audacieuses, en rupture formelle avec la production hexagonale’ (Icher 2010).

20. Un village français performs a similar historiographical role. Across seven seasons, the creators Frédéric Krivine (writer), Philippe Triboit (director) and Emmanuel Daucé (producer) create a fictional French community (Villeneuve, in the Jura) during the Second World War to offer a broadening of the usual resistance/collaboration dichotomy usually deployed in French historical dramas set during the Occupation.

21. Depardieu’s television collaborations with Dayan are multiple – besides playing Edmond Dantès in Le Comte de Monte Cristo/The Count of Monte Cristo and Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, he has also worked with her in Balzac (TF1, 1999), Les Rois maudits/The Cursed Kings (France 2, 2005), Raspoutine/Rasputin (France 3, 2011) and Diane de Poitiers/Diane of Poitiers (France 2, 2022).

22. Pettersen (2021) notes that, compared to the French film industry, French television series often offer bigger budgets for, and more creative leeway in, genres such as horror.

23. ‘la figure américaine du showrunner s’impose peu à peu dans le processus de création des séries françaises.’

24. The writing team is almost exclusively female – Herrero, plus Anaïs Carpita, Cécile Ducrocq, Jeanne Herry, Sabrina B. Karine, Eliane Montane, Camille Pouzol and Benjamin Dupas.

25. The concept of the lieu de mémoire was first introduced by French historian Pierre Nora in 1984. Nora used the term to refer to a location, object or symbol that holds cultural and historical significance for a community or society.