Anne Berest

Marina Hands

Mathieu Demy

Marie Drion

Jéremy Gillet

Zélie Rixhon

Luca Terracciano

Fadily Camara

Yves Jacques

Syrus Shahidi

Catherine Mouchet

Marie Bouvet

Comedy

Drama

Episode 6

Mythomaniac

ARTE

France

Folio Swami

They have smartphones. But they still rely on alarm clocks. And not just any alarm clock, powered alarm clock. Cute. That might have worked for *Home Alone*. For a 2019 TV series, that is just sloppy writing.

And the houses are like the ones in US shows, even if that is France. Yea, the bad design and crowded furniture, that is the French touch.

It keeps going better and better. The average French woman would go about with a bra no matter how hot outside. But this average mother will ask her husband to touch her breast on the curve, at the hour when every breeding neighbor is sending the kids to school.

The main character is lazy, particularly dim, and underworked. She might get a second job to make more money. But making money is a sin once you have a big home and two cars. She might learn to get some new skills. But that would imply work and effort. So she takes the extra time to weave conspiracies. Because she is troubled for not having anything valid to complain about.

The series is trying to be popular with both sides: it has a lesbian daughter, and a transsexual daughter, the family is so Left Wing perfection. Both parents are working. For the Right Wing they have the woman who is mostly at home. She is a good breeder and ready to make more children. The true blessing comes with the marriage.

Only that makes more obvious the propaganda. Gay teen-ages are not very popular. Transsexuals are not considered normal by the students or teachers. Well, the German guy is very violent, but he is German.

2019? Walking around school grounds like that? Hehehe, that was five decades ago when the unskilled writer was still in school. I am sure that all government propaganda shows this optimism and liberty that has nothing to do with the real life.

Here and there the writers inject some love for the governmental institutions, and some anti-corporate hate.

The most problematic is the inconsistency. The transsexual daughter welcomes a German exchange student. If the student comes to France he is supposed to be there to learn French. Yet the exchange student will never learn French, and the others will learn English to talk with him. The daughter understands nothing on German in the beginning, only to be sent to Germany near the end. Weird.

In the end, I think Sam's love story was much more interesting, and it is more genuine, than the efforts to excuse stupidity.

I think the problem lays with the usual laziness of European writers. The story itself can fill up 8, not 6 episodes. But because they are very shallow, they felt the need to dump stories. And the series became a trash can of failed stories. Instead of following the woman, or maybe her husband too, they throw in the granddad, and each child is special and could be an entire miniseries on themselves. Than the woman dying of cancer. And the factory. And the pregnant colleague. And the cult next door. And after they have thrown in way too many characters, they inject messengers: the dead old woman, grandpa's life partner. A mess.

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Mythomaniac

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