To close the love story between the soap opera, the longest ever produced in France, and its audience, France 3 is devoting a special evening to it. It opens at 8:15 p.m. with the broadcast of two episodes.
Around 9:00 p.m., they will be followed by an extra-long final episode of 1:40 entitled “Seven weddings for a funeral”. Kilian, the youngest son of Roland, the star character of “Plus belle la vie” (PBLV), will celebrate his wedding there on the Place du Mistral.
As the title suggests, this latest installment from PBLV promises its fans many twists and turns around the heroes and heroines of the series.
The last take of “Plus belle la vie” was shot on September 29 at the end of the afternoon in the historic studios of Belle-de-Mai, a working-class district of Marseille.
Shortly before 11:00 p.m., the documentary “The great adventure of Plus belle la vie” will return to the series, its treatment of major societal issues through its 4,665 episodes broadcast from 2004 to 2022, specifies France 3 in a press release.
The announcement of the end of the series last May by France Télévisions had caused a shock wave among its fans and in Marseille, where its filming generated a real economy.
Nearly 600 people worked each year for the series and 3,232 actors in all, to which must be added the extras, took part in the filming.
This popular series also gave the third channel record audiences in the early evening time slot, bringing together some evenings in 2008 up to six million viewers.
Far from these peaks, audiences fell to 2.7 million viewers in 2021-2022. The series which allowed the breakthrough of daily soaps in France also suffered from competition from its heiresses, “Here everything begins” and “Tomorrow belongs to us” on TF1 and “Un Si grand soleil” on France 2.
After the last day of filming, the president of France Télévisions, Delphine Ernotte, had promised to “compensate for the impact of the stoppage” of the soap opera on “the Marseille audiovisual sector”, by scheduling other filming in the region.
