The American election "is on a cliffhanger", estimates Anne-Solen Douguet

Anne-Solen Douguet and Didier Allouch sign the documentary House of Series, available on MyCanal.

-

• The documentary

  House of Serie

  s, available on MyCanal, questions the representation of American politics in the series.

• This film analyzes what the Donald Trump presidency has changed in the world of political series.

• At a time when the outcome of the US presidential election is still uncertain, the director of this fascinating documentary, Anne-Solen Douguet, deciphers for

  20 Minutes

  the dramaturgy of the duel between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

The White House and its occupants fascinate Hollywood screenwriters.

FOR

(

) to

through

, Anne Solen Douguet and Didier Allouch became interested through their documentary

, available on My Channel, representation of American politics in the series.

In this fascinating documentary, showrunners, actors and writers explain why American politics constitute a privileged arena for American series and how these series contribute to the American myth.

While the outcome of the US presidential election is still uncertain, director and producer Anne-Solen Douguet deciphers for

the dramaturgy of the duel between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

What has Donald Trump's presidency changed in the way American political series is scripted?

The presidency of Donald Trump has especially for the moment dry up the writers who do not quite know how to go about it.

They feel like they've been overtaken by a president, who comes from fiction, and inscribes ways of doing things they dared not imagine in their stories.

This is even more true for satirical series like

or

.

Their role and intention is to distort reality and push the cursor as far as possible.

, who started under Obama, has done this particularly well.

Armando Iannucci had imagined a character who did the worst in politics.

This Selima Meyer is a horror!

Except that, little by little, with Donald Trump, reality caught up with them because Trump was doing worse than them.

All of a sudden, the writers didn't know how to do it.

They told us they couldn't have imagined what Trump was doing.

Impossible for them to get into a play between authors and imagine separating children and parents from immigrant families!

Have American political series changed the way we approach the election and American politics?

As a Frenchwoman, I have the impression that I know American politics through series and fiction as much as through the news.

Has this changed our perception of American politics?

It probably influences.

There is bound to be a fairly powerful image sent to us.

Afterwards, it is the politicians who govern and change the world normally and not fiction!

"Cliffhanger", "suspense", "final" ... Why do Internet users use the vocabulary of fiction to talk about this campaign and this election?

First there is the American side of the thing where everything is still spectacular and grand.

I don't know if it is due to the country itself, to its state of mind or to the American dream, which is still a driving force for many.

We have the impression that fiction is always very close to reality and vice versa.

Everything gets mixed up a bit.

Eli Attie worked for Vice President Al Gore before working as a screenwriter for

, told us he went from show business politics to political show business.

With American presidents, you almost always feel like you're in a scenario, especially with Trump using all the codes of TV fiction.

He plays with suspense, surprise statements, etc.

This is undoubtedly why the vocabulary of fiction and TV series is somewhat adapted to reality today.

The American election seems more dramatic than the French one ...

Their system is more dramaturgical than ours.

We vote for a president live and at 8 p.m. we discover his image.

In the United States, there is the system of the great voters.

Someone can have more votes than the other, but it is not he who is going to be president for all that… Dramaturgically speaking, for fiction, it's still interesting to be able to play with that.

Moreover, the series are not deprived of it since since the recount of the votes of Al Gore against George W. Bush in Florida in 2000, all the American political series have included an episode or more on the electoral indecisions or more cases of electoral fraud.

How do you analyze the dramaturgy of the twists and turns of the night of the 2020 American election?

I imagine that this will give the writers the material to imagine a few twisted scenarios!

We're on a cliffhanger right now.

We don't know the end.

We have two options, either we go to

or to

 Afterwards, on a personal level, Hollywood screenwriters are more in the Democratic camp.

They are completely blown away by Trump and everything he does.

They only hope for one thing and that is to change.

If that doesn't change, they're going to have to find another way to tell it and look back on the past four years.

Exactly what future for the US political series after this epic “final”?

Several showrunners told us that perhaps they should look back on the past, on the Trump era, but also before.

Fiction allows you to look back, to stand back, to study several points of view, to stop, to accelerate and to imagine other things.

So, maybe it's by relying on the real story that they'll be able to tell things.

For the moment, the situation left them speechless.

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