“Iris”: on Canal Plus, Doria Tillier becomes “endearing” and succeeds

“Try to be normal for your date”advises Iris's boyfriend before his first interview with a potential editor. Normal? Not exactly what would define the title character of this Canal Plus creation, whose six episodes surprise and amuse. Iris is a dedicated teacher who does not hesitate to don an improbable skinned leotard for a natural sciences lesson on the human body.

To the great astonishment of his colleagues, but not of his students, who ask for more. She has a lover who she is no longer sure she loves, she lives in a shared apartment with her ambitious cousin with whom she shares no values, but knows how to be a well-intentioned listener for her colleagues. Author of a children's book, Iris imagined a little girl who rules the world. An editor will see in this project “both original and obvious” a possible bookstore hit, while Iris will be delighted to finally get to the end of something.

Sensitive, perched and yet well anchored in reality

Permanently questioning, imperial and funny, she comes up against the incomprehension of others. Faced with the necessary concessions imposed by society, Iris unsettles her stunned interlocutors with her unique logic and her natural disposition for debate. “People are willing to say anything to avoid any form of disagreement, but they confuse disagreement with conflict. » At any time in her life, at a wine shop, with friends, on the train, at the museum, at an official reception, she can turn the situation upside down, ignoring the consensual injunction “because it doesn’t happen”!

After walking away from a dinner party telling her open-mouthed hosts that they will be much better off without her, Iris is consoled by a stranger in the street. “My problem is that no one understands what I say, which means I have no one to talk to”she confided to him in tears. Magic of chance and plot twists, this unusual encounter will give him comfort. “Iris, you are a unique mix of pragmatism and slight dementia”will he define it clearly.

Each episode ofIris is full of incredible and tender scenes, and served by a cast of accuracy and extravagance. Like François Morel, as an attractive painter connected to the offbeat mind of Iris, Pascale Arbillot as a voluble teacher colleague who is unsure of herself, Jeanne Balibar, the inscrutable but caring editor. Special mention to Denis Podalydès, who plays a hilarious publishing house director, all with an oversized ego, on the lookout for the next success, and who treats us to an a cappella version of the Shame on you by Ophélie Winter, which represents quite an anthology moment.

As for Doria Tillier, she is the linchpin of this series. She, who had already written and produced projects with Nicolas Bedos, is in Iris the conductor of the project from start to finish, since she wrote and directed the series, of which she embodies the daring heroine, by turns sensitive, perched and yet well anchored in reality.

IrisCanal Plus, 10 p.m.