THE BEST OF QUEBEC TV
Stars honoured at Gémeaux
There were a lot of storylines to follow at the 30th annual Prix Gémeaux Sunday night at Théâtre Maisonneuve.
Two of the most powerful women in Quebec TV — writer-producer Fabienne Larouche and host-producer Julie Snyder — returned to the Gémeaux fold after spending years boycotting the Quebec TV awards ceremony for reasons too inside-baseball-like to get into here. They came back and they won big.
La Voix, which Snyder produces, won the Gémeaux for best variety series, and Snyder could barely control her excitement onstage — a normal state of affairs for this bundle of high-octane energy.
She thanked her husband, Parti Québécois Leader Pierre Karl Péladeau, for “moral support” and when the music came on to, in theory, speed her off the stage, she quipped: “I love this music. I could dance to it.”
She also talked of the phenomenal success of La Voix, the Quebec adaptation of the international music-competition format The Voice.
“Of the 58 countries that The Voice is broadcast in, Quebec is by far the place where The Voice has the biggest market share,” said Snyder.
And she wasn’t exaggerating. The show, which is hosted by Charles Lafortune, averaged around 2.6 million viewers every Sunday night during its run, giving it a market share of over 60 per cent. American broadcasters, even the most successful, can’t even dream of such market penetration.
The Larouche-produced Unité 9, a female prison drama, won as best drama series for a season of between 14 and 26 episodes. The Gémeaux categories became a little odd this year, with dramas sorted by number of episodes. So long-running cop series 19-2 won as best drama series for a season of between two and 13 episodes.
Claude Legault — who just might be Quebec’s most loved actor — won his 16th Gémeaux statuette for best actor in a drama (lasting between two and 13 episodes!).
But maybe the most heart-warming storyline Sunday at the TV gala was Macha Grenon’s first ever Gémeaux win, as best actress in a drama (two to 13 episodes) for Nouvelle adresse, the moving chronicle of a fortysomething Montreal journalist dying of cancer. It is being adapted for the CBC as This Life and premieres on the Canadian public broadcaster Oct. 5.
Onstage, Grenon thanked Radio-Canada for having the guts to broadcast a show with such challenging subject matter.
“It’s a subject that scares people,” said Grenon, backstage. “I think it’s a subject that wasn’t popular at first (with people in the TV milieu). But it created a real sense of creativity for us because we were sure people would watch. So it’s fantastic to have a network that takes a risk on something like this in the current context and, in the end, they were right because people wanted to watch it.”
Another story was one that seems to unfold at pretty well every TV awards event in Quebec in the past year or two: the TVA comedy series Les beaux malaises cleaned up. The smart sitcom, which was created by and stars popular stand-up comic Martin Matte, won as best comedy, Matte won as best actor in a comedy and Julie Le Breton, who plays his wife in the show, won as best actress in a comedy. It’s the second consecutive year at the Prix Gémeaux that the show and the two stars took top honours.
“I think the show works because people watch it and feel that we’re talking about them,” Le Breton said backstage. “We laugh about things that we’re not used to laughing about. Sometimes it’s good to look at things that are upsetting and look at them with humour. And Martin has succeeded in doing that and he’s done it with a lot of intelligence. And it’s done with a lot of lightness. It’s really well-written, which is the base of everything.”
Counting both the televised gala and earlier awards ceremonies, both Les beaux malaises and 19-2 nabbed seven Gémeaux trophies, while Nouvelle adresse won six awards over the course of the Gémeaux marathon, which began on Friday.
The show was hosted by two of Quebec showbiz’s best-known personalities, Véronique Cloutier and Éric Salvail. Salvail confirmed his position as one of the top TV hosts, snaring the award for best talkshow host for his nightly V chat fest En mode Salvail. The awards ceremony was broadcast live on the Radio-Canada TV network and it attracted many of the top stars from the local entertainment biz.
In a sign of just how sure the Quebec TV biz is of itself, the Gémeaux Gala was held the same night as the Emmy Awards. In other words, the Quebec TV movers and shakers know that their audience cares more about them than they do about the Hollywood stars.
We laugh about things that we’re not used to laughing about. Sometimes it’s good to look at things that are upsetting and look at them with humour.