The phenomenon HPI is back on TF1. Season 1 had peaked in viewership, breaking 15-year-old records. Some episodes had indeed gathered more than 12 million viewers. TF1 therefore did not have to hesitate for a single second to order a second season, the broadcast of which begins on Thursday evening. Alice Chegaray-Breugnot, one of the creators and screenwriters of the series, confides to Europe 1 to have been very surprised by such a success. A success she had in mind when writing season 2, although she tried not to analyze it too much.
“I try not to dissect this success too much, I think it’s a bit dangerous to start looking for what works and what doesn’t,” explains Alice Chegaray-Breugnot, who however has some ideas on the matter. . “Obviously, the fundamentals are this mixture of thriller and comedy, this character with his very liberating side who does everything that we would like to do and that we cannot do. I think there is also this inversion of gender in the roles of the duo, with the man who carries the seriousness and the empathy, and the woman who has the role of the clown who authorizes everything. It was a little new and it generates a lot of comedy.
A writing that plays more with the actors
Among the strengths of HPI, there is obviously the performance of actress Audrey Fleurot. She plays Morgane Alvaro, this eccentric housekeeper, recruited as a consultant for the police and whose high intellectual potential becomes very useful in solving investigations. A performance that helped the writers to go even more towards comedy in this season 2.
“When we write the first episodes of the series, we do not yet know the incarnation, that is to say the actors who will play the roles that we create”, recalls Alice Chegaray-Breugnot. “In season 2, we play with these incarnations, because we know our actors and we know what they do with the roles. We can go much further. It also allows us to develop the secondary characters, because we don’t have no need to present the universe of the series and the main characters. I think that we also found our identity more in season 2: laughing with the codes of the thriller, which everyone knows so well.
This second season of HPI is to discover Thursday evening on TF1 at 9:10 p.m. It is already available in full on Salto.