What lies behind HPI’s crazy success?

I’ll read you the synopsis: Morgane, 38 years old, 3 children, 2 exes, 5 credits and 160 IQ will see her destiny as a cleaning lady turned upside down when her extraordinary abilities are spotted by the police, for whom she will become a consultant as rebellious as effective. That’s the starting point. 4 seasons of 8 episodes followed, some of which reached peaks of 11 million viewers. According to Ouest France, this makes HPI the third most watched series in our country since the creation of modern audience measurement.

So what is this success a symptom of? Obviously several things, some of which have to do with narration, incarnation, etc., but I think there is also a more political dimension to this crazy success: something of the order of social and cultural softpower.

I think that this story of a single mother, a cleaning lady, who struggles but who still manages to hold her own against the rest of society is a sort of catharsis of a social phenomenon among the most important of the time and the least commented: the rise of single mothers. I have already cited the statistic here, but let us recall it, because it is eloquent: a little more than one in five households in France today rests on the shoulders of a single mother. That is twice as many as in 1990. It is a tectonic with multiple implications, which was notably at the heart of the Yellow Vest movement.

On this subject, moreover, I noticed something which, since then, has continued to run through my head: Morgane Alvaro sometimes looks like two peas in Ingrid Levavasseur, you know, this single mother, help- caregiver, who was a figure of the first version of the Yellow Vests. Same red hair, same type of face, sometimes, same colored headband in the hair… Take the test, dear listeners, and google occasionally: you will see that the resemblance is sometimes impressive. I had the opportunity to point this out to Ingrid Levavasseur who was amused. It wasn’t the first time someone had said that to him.

So, I don’t know, Nicolas, if the creators were inspired by it, or if it’s a coincidence. I think it’s more of a kind of soft power atmosphere. Sometimes, public affairs make their way through art or through entertainment; and the France of the forgotten imposes itself in retinal persistence. The issue of single mothers is the elephant in the room as they say. With the success of HPI, it’s even the elephant in the living room.