France 2 produces and broadcasts Un si grand soleil. TF1 owns Tomorrow Belongs to Us, Here Everything Begins and, Recently, Plus belle la vie. M6 lacked its own soap opera, so that it could fight on equal terms with the other channels. Announced a year ago by the chairman of the M6 management board, Nicolas de Tavernost, shortly after the failure of the negotiations that were supposed to lead to the merger of his group with TF1, the M6 soap opera also seems doomed to be buried prematurely.
To discover
- Check your TV schedule tonight
In December 2022, to show the channel's dynamism, particularly in terms of the creation of fiction, Mr. de Tavernost had announced a whole list of projects, including a soap opera. "We are also studying the possibility of a daily soap opera for the M6 channel," he said at the time, "but it is an expensive project, in the order of 30 million euros per year, which will take time. It's a format that has the advantage of being perfectly suited to video streaming."
Read alsoNicolas de Tavernost: "M6 needs DTT and DTT needs M6"
Questioned about the state of this "project" by Satellifacts Magazine, Quentin de Revel, director of fiction at the channel and head of TV productions at SND, let himself be carried away by a few revelations, confiding in particular that the project is at a standstill or almost. "We're not in a hurry," he hastened to add, arguing that "If the project were to see the light of day, it would be for a mid-2025 broadcast, at the earliest." Very good, but where exactly is the production? With the prospect of a late launch, in the 2nd half of 2025, the main lines of fiction are already necessarily drawn.
"It's a subject we've been looking at for several months, but we haven't made a decision," de Revel continued, going so far as to say: "It's a very engaging choice and to tell the truth, we're even in the process of rediscussing the channel on which we would broadcast it." In other words, there is nothing or three times nothing.
And the interviewee concluded: "We worked with several producers who all made us proposals that respect the great codes of the genre. (...) All the projects were avant-garde, in correlation with today's society. There needs to be a very important contemporaneity in this series. In this sense, the TF1 soap opera "Ici tout commence" inspires me a lot." What's next... "There's no fire in the lake", as our Swiss neighbours say.