The 10 series not to miss in October

The month of October promises to be smiling, at least on the small screen. Several comedies should indeed guarantee us a few hours of good humor, from “Désordres” by Florence Foresti on Canal+ to “Amateurs” with François Damiens and Vincent Dedienne on Disney+ via “Darknet-sur-Mer”, a wacky thriller with Artus on Amazon Prime. There will also of course be thrillers, the story of the Swedish entrepreneur Daniel Ek who founded Spotify, that of the Notre-Dame fire, and the new big Canal+ production on Marie-Antoinette…

Orders

Written, directed and played on screen by Florence Foresti, the “Désordres” series is definitely worth a look. Obviously playing with humour, the show captures with tenderness and derision the daily life of a single woman and mother in shared custody. The actress revisits her own story in the light of fiction, that of an actress looking for inspiration for her next show, “Epilogue”, during the year 2017. Florence Foresti draws in her own way from the imaginary of “Sex and The City” to offer a less fantasized version, closer to reality.

Surrounded by three friends, she depicts with the humor and the accuracy that we know her on stage her life as a mother, an artist, her doubts and her anxiety. In the vein of Blanche Gardin, who offered the autofictional story “The best version of myself” a few months ago, the actress knows how to laugh at herself here, at her relationship to others and to the passage of time. A real success, in sitcom format. On Canal+, October 3.

Darknet-sur-Mer

Ben and Flo are two Sunday geeks. On the darknet, they set up a fake contract killer agency to make money. But when Alkan, an aspiring gangster who can’t kill himself, calls on their services and realizes the scam, the tranquility of the small village of Ponet-sur-mer will be greatly threaten…

On this burlesque comedy scenario, Rémy Four and Julien War, the creators of this original Amazon series, had fun playing on the contrast between the small coastal village where nothing ever happens, and the abuses of a colorful Albanian gang of criminals. Misunderstandings follow one another at breakneck speed until a real gang war is provoked. The actors are all excellent, starting with Théo Fernandez (Stalk, Les Tuche), comedian Artus (Bureau des Légendes), Joséphine Drai (Plan coeur) and Isabelle Candelier (10 per cent). On Amazon Prime October 7.

The Playlist

Entrepreneur-centric biopics follow each other (“The Dropout”, “We Crashed”, “Super Pumped”) but are not alike. This time it’s Daniel Ek, the co-founder of Spotify, who benefits from his series. With Edvin Endre (“Vikings”) in the lead role, “The Playlist” promises to be a dive into the maze of the most powerful music streaming platform at the very moment of its creation, while piracy is still living its best. hours.

Although we were unable to view the series, the six-part account of the genesis of the fascinating company whose CEO announced a goal of 100 billion dollars in revenue within 10 years and the music streaming revolution rings true. like a tantalizing promise. On Netflix October 13.

The Staircase

This is one of the most famous news items of the last two decades in the United States. In December 2001, Kathleen Peterson was found dead in the middle of the night at the bottom of the stairs of her beautiful house in Durham, North Carolina. It was her husband Michael, a writer, who discovered her and called for help. First considered an accident, his death became suspicious after the autopsy and the police’s suspicions quickly fell on him… Then began a procedure that would lead Michael Peterson to his life imprisonment at the end of 2003.

This television series by Antonio Campos (“The devil all the time”) tells the story of this judicial investigation in a somewhat jostled chronology, which experienced several twists and turns (until 2017 when Michael Peterson, who always pleaded his innocence, agreed to plead guilty to end the prosecution). It is also the story of the ordeal of this family which found itself torn between the children who always supported their father and the sisters of Kathleen and her daughter from a first marriage who sided with the accusation, and that of the long-term documentary directed by the Frenchman François-Xavier de Lestrade (Games of influence, Laetitia) to testify to the dysfunctions of the American penal system. An exciting series masterfully embodied by Colin Firth and Toni Collette. On Canal+ on October 13.

The girl and the night

The first adaptation for television of a work by the most widely read novelist in France for already a decade, “La Jeune fille et la nuit” is a breathtaking incursion into the universe of Guillaume Russo. The plot focuses on Vinca Rockwell, a mysterious student who disappeared twenty-five years ago, and the consequences of her absence on her loved ones, who have now become adults consumed by guilt and obsessed with the need to solve the problem. case… or forget about it for good.

If we sometimes regret the slightly too literary aspect of the series, adapted by Marston Bloom, the Mediterranean setting of the city of Antibes, dear to the master of the French thriller, and the reversals of situation galore make it a story dynamic. The cast of secondary characters who orbit around the mysterious Vinka (Ivanna Sakhno), from the solar policewoman (Shemss Audat) to the unscrupulous journalist (Matthias Van Khache) gives a welcome depth to the plot. On France 2 from October 17.

Notre Dame, the part of the fire

After Jean-Jacques Annaud’s film this spring, it’s Netflix’s turn to present its version of the Notre-Dame fire which almost took down the two towers of the famous cathedral on April 15, 2019. If ” Our Lady burns” pulled on the side of docufiction by focusing on the heroic struggle of firefighters, “La part du feu” adopts a more choral and romanticized point of view. Admittedly, the main characters remain the firefighters but all around also gravitate a journalist in search of sensationalism, a father in search of his daughter, this same girl in search of drugs who saves a little boy in search of his father himself , and a Syrian refugee trying to draw his wife’s face…

Intended to root the event in the collective imagination, these multiple stories, whose only common point is that they intersect around the forecourt of Notre-Dame, sometimes disrupt the dramatic progression of the story of the fire. We don’t really understand how the firefighters are organized, why the fire started, how the lances reach (or not) the homes…

However, the fire scenes are spectacular and the confrontation between the _ invented _ character of the colonel (Caroline Proust), a believer and ready to do anything to save the cathedral, and the brigadier general (Roschdy Zem), more reluctant to endanger his men after having lost two of them in the drama of the rue de Treviso three months before, is interesting. That of the young firefighter, not yet recovered from the death of her companion who is none other than the general’s son, on the other hand, is not very credible. Too much romance kills romance. On Netflix October 19.

lovers

At first sight, everything suggested that this French creation signed Disney +, the second after “Week-end Family”, was going to be only an incredible adventure in the one-upmanship when Vincent (Vincent Dedienne), simple employee of the department of Meurthe -et-Moselle witnessing a car accident finds herself in possession of a misplaced phone and sees her life turned upside down.

Far from being an amateur job, the series finds its rhythm and its accuracy without failing to make us laugh by offering Vincent an ex-girlfriend who is also his boss (the excellent Fanny Sidney) and a colleague and friend in spite of himself, Alban (François Damiens) with whom he finds himself involved in a criminal plot that is beyond him.

The endearing comedy rises as well in its purely comic moments, parody of action films, as in its moments of fragility and emotions when it stages ill-suited, solitary characters who suddenly find themselves under fire. projectors. A nice surprise carried by two headliners whose chemistry is obvious and a worked balance. On Disney+ from October 19.

The world of tomorrow

An exciting series imagined for so many years by Katell Quillévéré and Hélier Cisterne. This story about the genesis of French rap and the cult group NTM, through the crossed destinies of Dee Nasty or even Kool Shen and JoeyStarr, is a real aesthetic and screenplay gem. A fiction that was built over hours of testimonies, in the company of those who forged the history of hip-hop in France, having lived in a visceral and vital way this period when everything was still to be built.

Playing with an outdated atmosphere and a soundtrack plunging the viewer back into a certain nostalgia, the fiction that won the Grand Jury Prize at Series Mania shines with its five-star cast, from Anthony Bajon hailed in “Au nom de the earth” and here in the skin of Kool Shen to the revelation Melvin Boomer, remarkable in the skin of JoeyStarr. At their side, a high-flying band: Andranic Manet (Dee Nasty), Victor Bonnel (DJ Détonateur S), Laïka Blanc-Francard (Lady V) or Léo Chalié (Béatrice). On Arte, October 20.

The Peripheral

After the Far West in “Westworld”, the originators of the phenomenon series return to explore the fertile ground of the future. Always attached to the themes of transhumanism and civilization, the creators immerse us this time in a forgotten city in the south of the United States, at a time when technology and cybernetics are an integral part of everyday life. Flynn (Chloe Grace Moretz), a young woman passionate about virtual reality, tries to maintain cohesion in her family between a sick mother and a damaged brother since her return from the army.

A story about the family everyone is born with and the one we fight for, “The Peripheral” is a rich sci-fi proposition that blurs the lines between present and future, but also between man and machine. If we only got to see the first three episodes of the series, their complexity and the presence of a talented cast left us with a taste for more. On Amazon Prime from October 21.

Marie Antoinette

We remember of course the superb film by Sofia Coppola in 2006 on the last queen of France, a teenager trapped in the terrible protocol of Versailles and who will take refuge in splendor and love. In this great international production by Canal+, the teenager who arrives in France, ingenuous and innocent as she is, will quickly take a more critical and political look at the practices of the court.

Written by Deborah Davis, the co-screenwriter of La Favorite, this Marie-Antoinette (played by a convincing Emilia Schüle), daughter of the Empress of Austria, certainly bends to her duties but will also seek to circumvent the rules or even to blow them up. The decadence is on. Less a victim than an author of her destiny, her character appears almost like a feminist before her time.

Like the “Versailles” series, created by Simon Mirren and David Wolstencroft for Canal+, we discover these ultra-known historical figures in a different light. This is particularly the case of Louis XVI (Louis Cunningham, the son of Princess Charlotte of Luxembourg in real life), often presented as an incompetent interested only in his clocks, and who here appears as an intelligent but introverted young man, more hunting than women, in rivalry with his younger brother who would have liked to be king in his place… On Canal+ on October 31.