Worship is a French series broadcast for a few days on the Prime platform, which recounts the genesis and development of a television project with a then new concept: Loft Storythe first episode of which was broadcast in the spring of 2001. It's a rather interesting object, and not first of all because it offers a form of dizzying mise en abyss: the TV within the TV within the TV – we understand that quickly, the series relies heavily on it to impress. No, it is quite fascinating in its way – very simple indeed – of portraying two remarkable female characters.
We are therefore at the dawn of the 21st century, and in certain northern European countries, reality TV shows are beginning to flourish. In France, a failing production company, PPP, under the leadership of a young visionary producer Isabelle de Rochechouart, decides to bet on this new horse, and proposes a concept of date show – understand a reality show to find love – on TF1 and M6. The two major channels initially refused, apparently frightened by the vulgarity of the project and its economic unviability, but M6 finally decided to do so to annoy its main competitor. From then on Isabelle found herself at the head of a colossal and unprecedented project, which involved a giant casting, during which a figure quickly interested and fascinated the team and then the public: Loana, the one who, one evening when the audience made to wait painfully, will sleep with another candidate in the Loft swimming pool, and will thus launch, for better or for worse, the great adventure of French reality TV.
Rift
At the heart of the series, therefore, these two young women: Isabelle and Loana. Finally, let's say that I focused on these two characters, who we would like to see more of, and who are unfortunately limited by the form of the series: a kind of media thriller like the Americans know how to do, I'm thinking of The Morning Show recently, serials that take place on TV sets or newspapers and where everything is always urgent, catastrophic or epiphanic – Worship in particular on the rivalry between M6 and TF1 and films it almost like a gangster film. It's a shame, because, a little drowned out, there are these two fascinating figures: Isabelle de Rochechouart, avatar of the producer Alexia Laroche-Joubert, daughter of a family of intellectual aristos who understands nothing of what she in fact, a young woman whose teeth scratch the floor, a kind of merciless ball of energy, and at the same time, brilliant.
And then there is Loana, discovered by one of the show's assistants while she is a dancer in a club in Nice, a fragile bombshell with a thoughtful expression, who enters the Loft to please her mother, and suffers there. immediately for not having the codes. Two characters played by two formidable actresses, Anaïs Rozam and Marie Colomb, and whose dissimilarity completely splits the fiction: like a scratch on the mirror that Worship tends to the viewer. I doubt that the series is very aware of this flaw: it tends rather to sell us a parallel effect between these two women who would both be marginal in their environment, one dyslexic and passionate about teleche among the bourgeois, the the other intelligent and hypersensitive among proles. Worship suggests female solidarity to bridge the gap that exists between the two, one of whom is nevertheless an exploited woman whose real name is also used in the fiction Loana, and the other an exploiter whose name, as if by chance, was modified – it thus benefits from doubt and a form of protection from fiction. This profound difference hampers the nice mechanics of the series, it is classy, and it is the most exciting engine of Worship.
