Astrid and Raphael on France 2: The screenwriter confesses the secrets of the production of season 5

After last Friday’s Crossword with Alexandra Elle, Astrid and Raphael will return solo (or almost) this Friday, November 8 at 9:05pm for the first two episodes of Season 5.

In this flurry of new episodes, Astrid and Raphael will have to juggle their complicated love lives and more unusual investigations. To discuss this fifth season and what lies ahead for our two heroes, AlloCiné spoke with Alexandre de Seguins, creator and screenwriter of Astrid and Raphael.

AlloCiné: After 4 seasons on the air, Astrid and Rafael continue to have great success. Season 4 actually attracted an average of 6.5 million viewers, the best audience for France Télévisions for the 2023/2024 season. How do you explain the series still doing so well?

Alexander de Seguin : It’s always difficult to understand why a series works. I think it’s because Astrid and Rafael have their own identities that are recognizable even in her storylines, which are always a little atypical.

Even visually, we focused on giving a visual identity quite early on. Composer Ervan Kermorvant also made a great contribution to the creation of an identity close to this genre. I think this is one of the elements that contributed to this success.

But for me, the only reason the show really works is because of the characters. Astrid’s character is particularly endearing and Raphael’s is particularly relatable.

There’s something about their friendship that makes the audience feel good and therefore helps build that encounter. The actors who play them have succeeded in creating this attachment. For Astrid’s character, we want to discover her world and we want to learn new things about her.

He intrigues and at the same time we feel close to him. As for Rafael’s character, he is not a traditional police officer. He is not infallible, he errs.

It’s always hard to renew after 5 seasons. What was the biggest challenge for this burst of episodes?

There were many challenges in this new season. The main thing was to respect the contract with the audience. We had to take what they know, while also updating our story and the relationships between the characters, which is the heart of the series.

We both have something new to say about their friendship, and at the same time, we can’t begin to say anything else without respecting the date, which is based on the story of Astrid and Rafael’s friendship.

We tried to work on stories where they argued. But it doesn’t work. What the audience comes for is their friendship. We’ve written about forty episodes now, that’s a lot.

I hope we manage to update ourselves because we don’t want to tell the same story as last year.

Astrid and Raphael’s investigations are always very original. How do you come up with new ideas? Where do you get your inspiration from? Do you get inspiration from real news?

We get very little inspiration from the news, even as writers of detective series, we are obliged to read the section in the newspapers, if only to perceive the human dimension of these moments when life goes wrong.

We feed on the genre for intrigue. For example, in season 5 we have an episode about werewolves. It’s the cinematic styles we like with Laurent Bourtin, co-creator, and Hélène Hassoun, co-director of the collection.

These are interesting worlds because we can create a real connection with the audience. It’s very codified, so we can blink, call it mythology.

When we do an episode about the Codex Borbonicus and the Aztecs, it’s obviously about all the cinema that fed our childhood. As for the stories, I don’t know exactly what inspires them.

We have a very strict way of writing episodes, but at the same time, each episode is a bit of a prototype. With each new story, we try not to follow the previous conspiracy with a suspect who should be masked.

We always try to challenge ourselves to find mysteries, paradoxes, things that will really surprise us as viewers. It’s also what sparked the ending of Astrid and Raphael’s pilot.

Astrid explains how to solve the puzzle, which is a nine-point puzzle. And to solve it, you have to think outside the box. And so we try to write. We try to approach the plots in the same way as puzzles.

We try to capture the imagination in a way that we really want to have an answer to, rather than taking a standard survey.

Watch Astrid and Raphael Season 5 this Friday, November 8 at 9:05pm on France 2.