| Summary: | In 2003, while reality television shows multiply on the programs of private broadcasters, faced with the large audiences generated by these new, popular formats, France Télévisions sought to join in on this aesthetic of transparency and banality that captivated such a broad public. A form of proximity, the daily day-time soap establishes itself as an evident substitute. The programmers are nonetheless confronted with their own inexperience on the subject: no series of this kind, in effect, had succeeded in finding its place on the French audiovisual landscape for twenty-five years. The broadcaster on one end and the producer on the other then undertook international studies, aiming to draw up an inventory of the practices that made the format successful abroad. First, techniques allowing industrial production of a daily program were imported. These directly influenced the modalities of writing, aesthetics, and tonality of the program — in such a way that Plus belle la vie, in all respects, inscribed itself into the international heritage of the soap. However, because it is above all a form of intimacy and of the familiar, the French soap necessitated a transposition of its issues to conform with the expectations of its intended public. In doing this, the series became a composite object, crossing the tradition tonality of the soap with burlesques elements, corresponding to other formats, more widely watched in France — following the example of the sitcom and the saga — constructing itself upon a classic culture: of vaudeville, or of the comedy of manners. In this way, the series is the space of a true work of adaptation, and, as a composite, it transforms itself into a new and hybrid format, which is eminently televisual in the sense that it is conscious of its codes and writing procedures, and exploits them. A neo-television program, in the sense of Umberto Eco, that leaves a central place for the spectators and makes them full-fledged members of a new form of communication.
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