How many worlds seen on our multiple screens this year? Especially one, ours, admired and kneaded in every way, with a whimsy or a rigor that makes us think that in many respects, and despite the obese locomotives that blocked the view, it was one of the most good years for serial fiction for a while.
“Atlanta” (OCS)
With the fourth and final season of the series by Donald Glover – originally focused on the rise of two cousins in the world of rap in Atlanta, before allowing themselves all the detours and loopings –, it was necessary to resolve to say goodbye to the object most fascinating television of the last decade, bomb of inventiveness, strangeness, mutant and political farce on the mirages of post-racial America. A trip that unfortunately never reached the general public. Its formal vitality and its thirst for research nevertheless place it in the pantheon of great generational works, commensurate with a Twin Peaks in his days. We must envy those who have not yet tasted it, and will have the chance to dive into it one day for the first time. S.O.
«The Bear» (Disney +)
The kitchens of a neighborhood boui-boui in Chicago, filmed just in time, like a human particle accelerator: stress, noise, chaos, white-hot teams, and so on The Bear, where a gifted young chef, having studied in the greatest starred restaurants in Europe, takes over the family sandwich shop after the suicide of his brother. Marked by the speed of its immersive style, a mixture of punk cachet and machine-gun dialogues, one of the beautiful revelations of the year explores the fatigue that one experiences trying to form a group, to tune the discordances to find a tiny place. of harmony. And refines, in the folds of his family drama, a subtle study of characters that we really look forward to finding in a next season. S.O.
“Tender Flesh” (France TV Slash)
Overflowing with energy, vulgarity, love, modesty, rage, euphoria, complicity, loneliness and soul-consuming pain, tender flesh is a series “about” that ends with an affirmation “I am neither girl nor boy. I am a bit of both. I haven’t decided.” The story of Sasha, an intersex child who arrives in a new school, a new life, far from the previous one. Nuanced, didactic, this creation of France TV Slash, a public service digital platform for young adults, is never entangled in a serious and professorial rigidity or crushed by the seriousness of its subject. We laugh a lot and often in front of Yaël Langmann’s series and its dialogues which capture the thousand and one meanings of adolescent verbal violence. The performance of Angèle Metzger, its main interpreter, remains one of the most beautiful we have seen this year. M.C.
«Irma Vep» (OCS)
Remake in the form of a series of his own 1996 film which was itself the remake of a soap opera in ten episodes from the 10s… Olivier Assayas succeeded in making this complicated and theoretical concept on the vertigo of formats and media a twirling and resolutely lively work, filled with humor (including on himself via Vincent Macaigne who cheerfully apes him as a neurotic director) and portraits of very embodied characters. Joyful chronicle of a film shoot at the same time as an ode to early cinema and to vanished loves (magnificent ghostly and shimmering evocation of Maggie Cheung, the Irma Vep of 1996), Irma Vep was one of the wonders of the year 2022. C.C.
“The World of Tomorrow” (Arte-Netflix)
Project long worn, postponed, rewritten, upset (especially when a feature film on the same subject was announced), documented in depth, The world of tomorrow offered itself to us with the intact freshness of a confident gesture. The duo Katell Quillévéré and Hélier Cisterne do not miss the casting nor the reconstruction of the 80s (a challenge for an era conducive to all sorts of gadgets and heavy references), handling in a skilful dosage comedy and social realism to tell by the menu the emergence of French hip-hop, first dance, then graffiti then rap, and especially the hesitant trajectory of Didier Morville, future JoeyStarr, and Bruno Lopes, alias Kool Shen. The crazy beauty of the series is that it values the fervor that condenses singular initiatives into a real but progressive collective fever and without trying to give more value to what will be successful against hypothetical losers. The same grace brings together the two future stars of NTM and the wonderful Daniel, alias Dee Nasty, DJ ahead of several trains on his time, or the graffiti artist Lady V, in the face of ambient machismo, and an Arte-Netflix co-production, a priori nothing monstrous but which proves that the requirement of the first and the means of the second can give birth to a small miracle. D.P.
“Ousekine” (Disney +)
On the night of December 5 to 6, 1986, France dishonored itself. On the night of December 5 to 6, 1986, the life of a young man, student, French, Algerian, came to an abrupt end. In the days that followed, the fate of all those around him changed. hot topic than that ofOussekine, the excellent series by Antoine Chevrollier produced for Disney +, which returns at length to the assassination by the police of Malik Oussekine, also the mobilization, the indecency, the trial that followed. Series of family, mores, melancholy, which has not been seen enough or commented on enough for our taste but it is not too late to come back to it – it is one of the advantages of the era of platforms than to remember the good things. O.L.
«Severance» (Apple TV +)
His universe all white and licked way iPod first generation let fear, at the beginning, a dystopia cold and off-putting. Mistake ! Severance, signed by Dan Erickson (with Ben Stiller directing six episodes), is an exciting satire of the contemporary world of work, whose metaphors that are installed in its starting postulate endlessly: typical workers data crunchers have knowingly, thanks to an implant in the brain, decided to obliterate their personal memory at work. This great repressed desire of HRDs around the world finds its fulfillment when the characters take the elevator (whose ping punctuates the episodes like a metronome of anguish), leaving each of the two beings composing them to forget the other: farewell, family and loved ones as soon as we are at work; goodbye, mindless working days back home. (That we all generally lie to each other about our jobs is one of his smartest hypotheses, if not the most obvious). A casting genius has brought together Patricia Arquette as a sadistic supervisor, Adam Scott as an adorable widower with the eyes of a puppy dog, and the wonderful John Turturro and Christopher Walken in a duet as absurd as it is intensely moving. E.F.-D.
«Station Eleven» (Syfy)
We would laugh at the distressing banality of the apocalypse in TV series. But first we do not forget to have discovered this story of a dazzling pandemic at the beginning of the year, within the framework of a festival where a third of the visitors, masked, stared with a bad eye at neighbors in queues who were walking around with their mouths in the open air. And then because the end of the world ultimately interests very little Station Eleven, which looks at the before and especially the after. Anguished and cruel in its painting of individual journeys where one lives and one dies by virtue of a lottery of which no one has the secret, the elegant choral series by Patrick Somerville (Maniac) reveals another face, brighter and almost rustic, as she clings to a group of survivors who are trying to rebuild society. A system D world that elevates theater and the arts to the ultimate balm. M.C.
«This Is Going to Hurt» (Canal +)
Centered on the formidable accelerator of narratives that constitutes the hospital, a space both outside the world and invaded by it, offering a precipitate of its worst and best (last year it was Hippocrates), This Is Going to Hurt is distinguished first by the unbearable arrogance of the obstetrician to which she clings. Far from celebrating an almost heroic vision of caregivers, this BBC production stages in a nervous and insolent way the estrangements which agitate doctors, interns, nurses and administrative staff confronted with the reality of the British health system, underfunded, understaffed and on the verge of collapse. A state of unease so deep that it comes to dissolve the most sparkling characters. M.C.
«We Own This City» (OCS)
A puzzle, a news item, a system? For their second series, which took place in Baltimore, a troubled city in Maryland which was both the pretext and the setting for the mythical The Wire, David Simon and George Pelecanos adapted investigative journalist Justin Fenton’s book on the Gun Trace Task Force, an elite unit with indecent powers that took full advantage of it to organize a large-scale corruption operation. Events that occurred in the 2010s, We Own This City, a dazzling mini-series in both form and edifying power, exhibits in a circular whirlwind, taking the eye and the story into all the institutions of the city. A very large series on what institutions can and can no longer face the collapse of American social life. Also a romantic tour de force, recalling for the umpteenth time how much David Simon knows how to innovate in the way of telling stories on television. O.L.