No, I don’t burn punch or turkey in the oven. After years of seclusion and illness, the great Serge Thériault put on the checkered jacket and nightcap of Moman – alias Jacqueline Paré – for the time to shoot the final scene of the last of the six episodes of The little lifewhich Tou.tv Extra offers from Tuesday.
Monday noon, Radio-Canada showed the extract of Moman’s return to journalists and actors of the sitcom cult of Radio-Canada, who had not yet viewed it. And tears flowed in the room. Not because this sequence is bathed in sadness, on the contrary. But because after the presentation of the documentary Outside Serge outsidewe all thought that Serge Thériault, who suffers from serious depression, would never return in front of the cameras.
Seeing this 75-year-old actor again with his multicolored costume, in the Paré’s retro kitchen, in the company of his old accomplice Ti-Mé (Claude Meunier), is super moving.
Really. Absent from the screens since the special broadcast of Little Life: Christmas Story, in 2009, Serge Thériault still has his sense of comedy. He delivers his lines as in the golden years of this local TV classic, which has 59 episodes having been rebroadcast no less than 12 times on Saturday evenings on Radio-Canada.
Serge Thériault, absent from Monday’s press conference, only appears in the last minute of the sixth and final episode The little life. It goes very quickly, but it’s like reconnecting with a precious friend that you thought was gone forever. On the other hand, radio silence on the context which brings Moman back into the plot. The pleasure of discovering it is yours. On regular TV, these six half-hours of The little life will play Saturdays at 6:30 p.m. in February 2024.
It’s the 1er June that Serge Thériault recorded his unexpected participation in The little life. No other actor in the cast was notified of his brief stint. The public was taken out of the studio, in order to keep the secret and not add additional pressure on the actor’s shoulders. The number of cameras was reduced from five to two and there were only six people on set, all people Serge Thériault knew, including director Pierre Séguin and makeup artist France Signori.
“Serge was very happy. He was still fine. He’s getting better. He leaves his house,” confides Claude Meunier, 72, author and creator of Moman et Popa.
It only took 30 minutes and four takes (the second was kept) to complete the only scene involving Moman. Serge Thériault only accepted this “cameo”, his health not allowing him to take on more.
Now, what happens or breaks this sequence of The little life, 30 years later? It’s better than the specials (The year 2000 bug, Christmas at the Paré family), but it does not reach, alas!, the comic level of the original episodes, relayed between 1993 and 1998. I laughed a few times, never as much as at the time.
In fact, Claude Meunier reworks his original absurd recipe with older characters wearing gray wigs. That’s all. Think memory loss and urinary incontinence gags and they’re all there.
The first episode, which retains its original credits, shows us what the Paré look like today and we can only smile when we see the ball of graying hair of the rebel Caro (Guylaine Tremblay), the cane of Rod (Bernard Fortin) and the plain clothing of Lison/Creton (Josée Deschênes), the new spokesperson for Almost adult diapers.
Retired for two years, Rénald/Pinson (Marc Labrèche) suffers from heart problems, Réjean (Marc Messier) leaves prison and is still running around, Thérèse (Diane Lavallée) works as a mental care attendant (in the locker room, ultimately) from a psychiatric hospital, while Popa (Claude Meunier) languishes in the absence of Moman, who has gone grocery shopping without ever coming back.
Dejected, Ti-Mé cooks calf’s liver muffins and pampers his waste around the dining table. It’s Thérèse, still combed spectacularly, who takes care of washing Rod, the new DJ at the Sommeil residences (I laughed).
Lonely, Ti-Mé also registers on Timber (the equivalent of Tinder, you will have understood) and meets two rather intriguing “women”. The second episode descends into burlesque with Rénald’s heart problems and Creton’s portable defibrillator, which resuscitates his man at any moment. Still in a relationship with Linda (Sylvie Potvin), the good Pogo (Rémy Girard) loses his memory and, as host of a community TV show called I rememberLet’s just say it gives some funny moments. You’ll see twin cousin Stimé Paré (Stéphane Rousseau) again in the sixth episode, which involves a ” jerry-boam » from Château Ragoût sparkling.
In short, it’s correct Little life 2023, without being transcendent or hilarious. As Claude Meunier’s universe was already out of step in the mid-90s, it doesn’t stand out so much today. That said, we may have covered the vertical bed and shepherd’s pie jokes.
Claude Meunier does not hide it: he felt “hurt” that Radio-Canada filed The little life on Tou.tv Extra, rather than on its regular channel. “ A boy a girl came out of Extra a week later on TV,” argued the author and creator on Monday.
Claude Meunier is not wrong about that. The little life was a huge popular success thanks to Radio-Canada’s traditional audience. This (free) gift should have been offered to the faithful from the beginning and not forced on them to subscribe to another paid platform.