Adapted from the Spanish series “Machos Alfa”, Noémie Saglio’s new creation follows four long-time friends who get caught up in a post-#MeToo world that gives them fewer and fewer gifts.
If it suffers from the same faults as “Plan Cœur”, this series describes with great sensitivity the difficulty of reinventing oneself in one’s relationship with others.
A very good surprise brought by a troupe of actors in great form, to be discovered this Friday, January 24.
We confess it to you without taboo. We started the series reluctantly. Super Males, whose pitch could suggest the worst. “Cédric, Tom, Jérémie and Tonio are struggling to find their place and find love in a society that questions patriarchy, and gradually deprives them of their privileges”warned a synopsis of the Netflix series whose trailer showed its four heroes in full training for “free yourself from toxic masculinity”. Bad joke or real subject? The balance ultimately leans towards the second option for a series that is much more touching than it seems.
An idea from Spain, a very French pepper
Avant Super Malesthere was Alpha Malesa Spanish series also available on Netflix of which the French fiction is the direct adaptation. The basis remains the same, namely four long-time friends with different but complementary backgrounds. The boss who prefers to leave rather than co-manage the company with his former intern rubs shoulders with the husband whose married life is failing, the one who has just separated from the mother of his teenage son and the Don Juan who hopes to put the ring on his partner’s finger. Under the direction of Noémie Saglio, already at the origin of Heart Plan on the same platform, the tricolor version moves away from its model to impose its mark.
Except that Super Males starts off rather badly, falling into the same pitfalls as Heart Plan whose true heart, precisely, was hidden under a thick layer of vulgarity. Subtlety is absent – as evidenced by these permanent close-ups of the actors’ buttocks, covered or exposed, in the first episode – and that’s a shame.
Because the series, like the one that preceded it, raises more than relevant questions about our relationship to society or more simply about our relationship to others. The course to teach the four friends to “become better men” ultimately occupies far too small a place in the plot to be its driving force. It’s done in good humor, not really with finesse but whatever, the whole ends up carrying a little more each time over the episodes of around thirty minutes.
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In this band of merry men, the public will find Guillaume Labbé, already in the credits of Heart Planmore macho than reason, a delicate Manu Payet, a completely lost Antoine Gouy and a moving Vincent Heneine. Their female colleagues Mélanie Bernet and Olga Kurylenko repay them, with a huge crush on the crazy Ariane Mourier. These Super Males started by annoying us before embarking us with their cracks and their failures, to the point of wanting to continue to follow their (mis)adventures in a season 2 which has not yet been announced.
>> Super Males – 6 episodes from January 24 on Netflix
