The former prime minister will soon turn into a TV series!

Has the France Télévisions group found its right-wing black baron?

In any case, this is what the announcement at MIPCOM 2022 suggests about the start of the adaptation of the political thriller Shadow, written by Edouard Philippe and Gilles Boyer and published in 2011.

Presented by France Télévisions as A “A political thriller and corrosive comedy about the use of French politics, written with two politicians who held the highest positions”It casts us into the shadows at the heart of a system whose ultimate goal is to seize power.

The plot of the series is as follows: Cesar Casalonga has two passions in life: his job as a political consultant, where he excels as a strategist, and his boss, Paul Francoeur, whom he has accompanied for 20 years in his rise to the presidency of the Republic.

This goal is finally seen when Francoeur wins his party’s nomination after a primary that pits him against his rival, Marie-France Tremaux. Victory is near and all the more beautiful. While it’s time for a meeting between the two candidates’ headquarters, Cesar receives an anonymous phone call informing him that the primary is rigged. He will quickly have to face the facts: a fraud has been committed.

In the middle of the presidential campaign, there is a mad race against time, and the traps set by their political opponents – some of them may be from their own camp – multiply: César and Marilyn, Francoeur’s director of communications, supported by the candidate’s close bodyguard, must expose the obvious fraud before the press or the opposing camp. He will take it in hand. But paranoia prevails in the candidate’s entourage, and the team’s flaws become more and more visible.

The cast was later announced by France Télévisions

The novel between Edouard Philippe and Gilles Boyer was written in 2010, at a time when the former was not yet prime minister, let alone the aspiring president we know today. Until his friend Gilles Boyer, who met to create the UMP, was then Alain Juppe’s chief of staff at Bordeaux City Hall.

Thanks to their know-how in politics, the two men were able to deliver the low blow that enlivens the behind-the-scenes of the presidential campaign. Without imagining the twists and turns that would follow, a few months later, in the actual election campaign that led to Francois Hollande’s victory in 2012.

Directed and written by Pierre Scholer (L’Exercice de l’Etat) and Cédric Anger (The Next Time I Aim at the Heart), with co-writing by Lamara Lepretre-Habib, as well as Edouard Philippe and Gilles Boyer. Six 52-minute episodes of In the Shadows are scheduled to begin filming in spring 2023.

France Télévisions, which has yet to announce which channel or platform the group will target for the series, explained in a press release that the cast will be announced at a later date. Therefore, the identity of the actors who will have the difficult task of making the characters of Cesar Casalonga, Paul Francoeur and Marie-France Tremaux believable remains a mystery.