Studio TF1 is celebrating recent successes at home and abroad with Sacha Vucinic and Xavier Marchand’s sports documentary “Leon Marchand: Beyond Gold” and Slimane-Baptiste Berhoun’s mystery drama “Surface.”
While the doc series on French Olympic swimming champion Leon Marchand and his life in the wake of four gold-medal wins at the Paris Olympics has scored record viewing results for France TV, “Surface” has proved a hot seller across Europe and in the U.S.
Offering an intimate look at the young Marchand over the year following his Olympic victories, “Leon Marchand: Beyond Gold” goes beyond the medals to explore his identity, ambition and life as he copes with sudden fame, pursues engineering studies and navigates personal growth at age 22.
Setting an all-time documentary record for France TV, the three-part series drew 2.3 million average views per episode when it premiered on the france.tv platform in July followed by 1.6 million viewers on France 2 during its Sept. 1 TV premiere and a total of more than 13 million views across social media, including more than 1 million views on YouTube.
‘Surface’
Baptiste Langinier/France Télévisions/Quad Drama
On the scripted front, Studio TF1’s hit mystery drama “Surface,” which premiered last year at Canneseries and went on to become a major hit on France TV’s streaming platform, has found enthusiastic buyers abroad.
Based on the bestselling novel by Olivier Norek and produced by Quad Drama for France TV, the show has sold to MHz Choice in the U.S., the BBC in the U.K., AMC Global Media in Spain, Vodafone for Greece, Blue Play for French-speaking Switzerland and to Moment in a deal covering airlines and cruise ships.
Also presented last year at the Unifrance Rendez-Vous in Le Havre, the six-part series follows Parisian police captain Noémie Chastain, who is visiting a remote town to assess a police station’s possible closure while recovering from a traumatic facial injury.
When the discovery of a child’s remains leads to the reopening a 20-year-old missing person’s case, Chastain decides to lead the investigation herself, in the process uncovering dark secrets that impact both her and the town.