She’s super beautiful and filthy rich. She has 1.4 million Instagram followers, runs a lucrative swimwear business, and is a single mother to her 4-year-old daughter, Wolfie.
Respect for all that, Elisabeth Rioux. Few people of her generation (the Zs) drive a Porsche at 27 and live in such a vast McManoir in Blainville, in the northern suburbs of Montreal. Elisabeth Rioux, known as Éli, has been building her success for about ten years with polished photos on social media, where she poses in a bikini, her hair perfectly styled, against a backdrop of blond sand and turquoise waters.
That said, does the glamorous life of this popular Quebec entrepreneur, globetrotter and influencer deserve a six-episode, one-hour docuseries, as the one offered by Amazon Prime Video since Friday? Not really, no.
Because this novelty, entitled Elisabeth Rioux: no filteris more of an infomercial than a gripping docuseries like the David Beckham docuseries on Netflix, where the soccer star is vulnerable, funny and honest.
In six hours, Elisabeth Rioux often sounds like a skipping record. She works hard, people don’t understand the harshness of her job, she feels an enormous weight for her company Hoaka to grow and she no longer knows where to draw the line between her private life and her work… It’s okay, we understood after the first seven rehearsals.
The only time Elisabeth Rioux tears off her mask of perfection and presents a more authentic version of herself results, alas!, in a moment of discomfort, which seems scripted and poorly acted.
Overwhelmed by the pressure, Elisabeth Rioux cracks and locks herself in her luxurious room, while a team waits to snap photos of her new hair care line. Elisabeth is then in Milan. With her best friend, Claudia Tihan. In a magnificent villa. In Italy.
I mean, it’s pretty hard to feel sorry for her, even when she’s trapped in such a gilded cage. Then, ta-dam, Elisabeth snaps out of her stupor, takes off her curlers and starts the photoshoot like the “girlboss” she is, forgetting all her big worries, magic, magic!
This is probably the biggest weakness of this docuseries: its content. Or, rather, its lack of content.
For example, Elisabeth is dating a young man she never names and who doesn’t have any accounts on TikTok or Instagram. Scandal! And it’s a huge drama for her. Will she be able to feed her platforms when she spends time with him?
Spoiler: The guy disappears from the picture and this punchless plot goes back where it should have stayed, in the trash.
Also, the sequence where a terrified Elisabeth confronts the founder of the QC Scoop site is already outdated, even archaic. This Quebec gossip web page was disconnected last January and no one talks about it anymore.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY PRODUCTION
Elisabeth Rioux in the first episode of the series dedicated to her
Elisabeth Rioux’s family occupies a large block in the six episodes of the Amazon Prime Video docuseries, shot in French. It takes a (bikini) village to run Elisabeth Rioux’s business. Her father Steeve and her sister Dolorès support her in the management of Hoaka, without giving any speeches or very transcendent advice.
In fact, most of the participants in the series are not very interesting. Starting with the main character, who struggles to put into words her reality as a web star on the road to overwork.
I would have liked to see more business scenes like the one where Elisabeth Rioux meets, in Milan, the suppliers of her future range of shampoos. The influencer hates the color of the bottles and refuses to compromise that does not fit with her vision of the product. Here, we feel she is in her element, in control of every detail of her brand image. It would have been instructive to explore more of the “business” side of her life as a content creator.
We must also salute Elisabeth Rioux’s courage in speaking publicly about the domestic violence she experienced with her ex-partner Bryan McCormick, father of little Wolfie. In 2022, Bryan McCormick spent six months in prison for hitting, strangling and threatening to kill Elisabeth Rioux.
From one episode to the next, we follow Elisabeth and her friends on trips to Costa Rica or Miami, on trips that only serve to feed the social networks – personal and professional – of the influencer and single mother.
This proposal from Amazon Prime Video works like a charm, because Elisabeth Rioux: no filter was ranked third among the most-watched programs on the platform in Canada on Tuesday.
We agree that Elisabeth Rioux, slim, tall and blonde, corresponds to the standards of the beauty industry. And that she has raked in tons of money with her body that is anything but atypical or abnormal.
That’s why it rings quite false, in the third episode, when Elisabeth launches a collection of Hoaka “plus-size” swimsuits. Her speech on body diversity is sorely lacking in naturalness and conviction, like the rest of the series, unfortunately.