Hugo pop! | Sound the alert for Alerts

For a year, Alerts sounds louder in our televisions. The intrigues become more complex, the tone darkens and the grim cases, like that of the Vulture this fall, make us shiver on Mondays at 9 p.m.

For a year, Alerts has gained muscle and depth. With Witches et The weaponsthis popular work, which derives from the miniseries Amber Alert from 2019, complements the trio of TVA soap operas, which (finally) bring us more traditional stories of twisted or broken families.

And the contemporaneity ofAlerts stems from the hiring of two new authors, Guillaume Corbeil and Patrick Dupuis, as well as Sarah Lévesque, who have been supervising the texts of the TVA detective soap opera since its fourth season. The ballerinas were their idea. The murder of Captain Roméo Goulet (Jean-Michel Anctil) too.

“We inherited a big electric train, with a very loyal audience,” notes Guillaume Corbeil, who has written extensively for the theater, including the play Five faces for Camille Brunelle.

« Alerts is closer to the tone of the heavy series we love. We’re trying to make it less of a soap opera. We want it to be more rhythmic, more modern. And we stretch the elastic of the soap opera as far as possible, without it breaking,” continues Patrick Dupuis, who collaborated on the scriptwriting of Forever, not another day et Good morning Chuck on the Crave platform.

The two main authors, who took over from Julie Hivon (sleepless night), cite The Killing, True Detectivefrom and Mare of Easttown as influences in their process of making the 26 episodes per season that count Alerts. Obviously, the budgetAlerts does not at all compare to that of a True Detective : Night Countrywhich was filmed for 10 million per episode, or 20 times the means of a typical Quebec soap opera, which costs around $500,000 per hour to produce.

When we say that local creators accomplish miracles with little money, here is a glaring and strident example.

Since the return of the holidays, Alerts explores behind the scenes of a very tight electoral campaign, where a Québec solidaire party is preparing to win its first elections. But less than two weeks before the vote, the co-leader of the group, Aurélie Trépanier (Catherine Renaud), disappears from the map.

The Cerbère squad of the SQ discovers that the left-wing politician’s “perfect” family is hiding several secrets. First, Aurélie and her partner Léonard (Guillaume Baillargeon) live in separate rooms and adopt a more open couple model, let’s say.

Then, Aurélie had a very stormy intimate affair with a non-binary activist called Fray (Marianne Verville) and who uses the personal pronoun iel. And the party’s co-leader, Gregory Lamarche (Alex Bisping), who resembles Richard Bergeron, has revealed his misogynistic and power-hungry side, which places him on the list of suspects who may have orchestrated the kidnapping of the charismatic Aurélie .

In parallel, Alerts shows us the meetings of a mysterious private club, where the members, all men in chic clothes, wear animal masks Squid Game. We can assume that future Prime Minister Aurélie Trépanier was delivered to them in the context of a cruel and sadistic game for extremely rich people.

We also guess that the arrest of Gabriel Gomez (Luis Oliva) will allow us to understand where this hatred towards the police comes from. It was Gabriel Gomez who stabbed Captain Goulet to death, a brutal gesture which seriously shook director Frédéric Lamontagne (Benoît McGinnis), a solitary, clumsy police officer addicted to his work.

Many readers believe that Frédéric Lamontagne experienced romantic feelings towards Roméo Goulet, whose sexual orientation has not been revealed either. Is this really the case? According to the two authors, Director Lamontagne is more asexual than gay. And so as not to forget his “friend” Romeo, Frédéric Lamontagne kept his hand top, well, well.

Regularly, to take the pulse of the fans, the writers ofAlerts review the comments on the show’s official Facebook page. What you write there, they read it.

And unlike STAT or to Indefensible, Alerts will not attack the detectives who form the hard core of his Cerberus squad. Captain Stéphanie Duquette (Sophie Prégent), the “mom” of the Cerbère investigators, came close to death in the spring, but she recovered by developing an addiction to opioids.

“We can add characters around the main cell, but we cannot kill any in the center,” confirms author Patrick Dupuis.

This is excellent news for detective sergeants Pelletier (Danny Gilmore), Magloire (Frédéric Pierre) and Bernard (Mylène St-Sauveur). Quite honestly, viewers do not have the nerves strong enough to endure another psychodrama à la Philippe Dupéré (Patrick Labbé) from STAT.