the creator of the series “Parliament” wants to turn the former chancellor

Noé Debré is the creator and screenwriter of the comedy series “Parlement”, the third season of which is broadcast on the digital platform france.tv. The series, which won an award at the La Rochelle fiction festival in 2023, and whose plots took place in Parliament, has moved to the European Commission in Brussels. He takes us behind the scenes of this new season, always with the objective of making the European institutions better known to the general public, but in a good mood.

franceinfo: It’s a crazy bet to make a comedy series behind the scenes of European institutions. In this third season, we find the parliamentary assistant, Samy, who is no longer the candid one of the first season and who is now a political advisor. What will happen to him in this season?

Noé Debré: He became a political advisor and Valentine Cantel, the MP he worked for during season 2, returned to become a commissioner. Samy will help him pass his parliamentary hearings, some conflicts will ensue. We are going to tell a new chapter in political life in Brussels, which is the war between the institutions, the Commission and the Parliament.

There is always this battery of characters, each more zany than the last. Are these existing characters or at least were you inspired by existing characters?

Any resemblance to an existing character is obviously coincidental! We draw inspiration from situations rather than people.

So how do you document yourself?

It’s very simple, we really write on the spot. We get accredited to Parliament with my co-authors and we enter Parliament. It’s a fairly open place. We open doors, we sit where we can and then we take people to lunch, to have coffee. Especially with parliamentary assistants because they are the ones who tell the best anecdotes.

“We tell parliamentary assistants what we have in mind and they tell us how it goes. Very often, what they tell us is much more funny, surprising, interesting than what we make up.”

Noé Debré, screenwriter

at franceinfo

Until the end of the first season, you filmed in the real Parliament and now, the new thing for this year is that you were able to film at the European Commission in Brussels. Was it easy to open the doors?

No way. It was a real campaign to open those of Parliament and to succeed in filming there, but now they trust us. For the Commission, this was a whole new task of convincing people to do. It wasn’t easy because we’re filming in the building called the Berlaymont, where all the commissioners are. It’s the central building, it’s the HQ, it’s really the Elysée.

What is the reaction of the politicians who come across you? I imagine that it is not trivial to have a film crew with actors who play the role of its commissioners or its parliamentarians. The series is making fun of them, are they taking it well?

I think so. They perhaps see the interest in doing a series on European institutions so that people can understand what is happening there, have a bit of a topography, etc. And often, it’s very nice. In this season, we have a real commissioner who appears, Margrethe Vestager. We also see Manon Aubry from La France insoumise from the first episode.

Are there other personalities that you would like to integrate into the scenario and who hasn’t said yes yet?

We wrote to Angela Merkel, but so far, no response. It’s fun to have people appear because having them show up is already a very funny experience. The difficulty is that we don’t have enormous room for maneuver. We have a fairly tight rhythm when we shoot and they literally have ministerial agendas. Making the two work together is not always easy.

Did it absolutely have to be a comedy?

My intuition is that it had to be made into a comedy because the European institutions are a metaphor for the complexity of the world. The strength of comedy is that the more complicated things are, the more lost the character is, the more we laugh.

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