No more treadmill, no more catchy theme song and no more mini zoo in the studio: Julie Snyder is hanging up her microphone from La Semaine des 4 Julie and her daily talk show is finally ending on April 6th after four seasons on the waves of Noovo.
Posted at 21:05
The producer and presenter announced it to her team and then to her audience on Wednesday night. “It’s part of my decision to focus on new projects. I’m happy for Mélanie Maynard and Marie-Lyne Joncas, but to this day I’m the only woman to produce and host a daily talk show. It’s a marathon and a sprint that you have to run at the same time,” the producer and presenter confides in me.
In an interview, Julie Snyder says she is neither drained nor jaded from her job. Nor is she playing the proverbial “family reasons” card to explain the end of her show. The President of Productions J just wants to catch her breath after four years of intense whirlwind.
I see my guests’ shows, I read their books, I watch their movies or their shows, I want to do my job to highlight the artists. And that takes a lot of energy and time. The show is called the 4 Julies, but there’s only one, one Julie.
Julie Snyder
The presenter does not leave a sinking TV ship, she emphasizes. “The team works well, everyone is having fun, the researchers are great, it’s probably our easiest season,” says Julie Snyder.
The demon is already working on an ultra-secret TV project that she would heat up for Noovo, a project she doesn’t want to talk about. “I want to do things that have never been done before, I want to generate something new and support the Occupation double, Survivor Québec, Complètement lycée and Fabuleux Printemps de Marie-Lyne teams,” she lists.
In all, Julie Snyder will have piloted 363 hour-long episodes of La Semaine des 4 Julie at Noovo. Hell is us had lasted four years at Radio-Canada, while Le poing J had manned TVA’s antenna between 1997 and 2000 before its designer flew to France. Her kiss to Michel Drucker on the show Tapis rouge in June 1999 then put her on the radar screens of several European producers.
“I was then offered by Thierry Ardisson in Everyone Speaks About It to be the king’s madwoman. I had also received offers from channel M6. I loved working in France,” remembers Julie Snyder, who finally landed on France 2 with Friday, it’s Julie.
On the set of La Semaine des 4 Julie there was sometimes a Mexican raffle atmosphere with the human Ferris wheel, a free-roaming alligator, a swimming pool in Les Tannants or an alpine ski slope with a chairlift in the studio. Julie Snyder fully embraces the eclecticism of her show, in which she welcomed the creators of Fecal Matter and Canadian former CEO Marc Bergevin, as well as the group Simple Plan.
“I am proud to offer something different and to have worked in freedom. Yes, we have received guests that we have seen elsewhere, but we have always offered something different. When Denis Villeneuve came, we built a big set at La Dune. We also had wolves,” lists Julie Snyder, who also interviewed Ellen DeGeneres, Jodie Foster, and Enrique Iglesias on her talk show.
The couches of La Semaine des 4 Julie launched the careers of several columnists, including Rosalie Vaillancourt, Arnaud Soly, Marie-Lyne Joncas and Mathieu Dufour, who joined Productions J as production assistant for “Occupation double Greece” in autumn 2018.
PHOTO FROM THE SHOW’S FACEBOOK PAGE
Many artists and personalities have been on Julie Snyder’s show.
The popular “Cooking for the Lazy” segments, designed to stave off staff layoffs during the pandemic, culminated in surreal moments featuring Queer Eye host Antoni Porowski, writer Dany Laferrière, singer Julien Clerc and even Kim Thuy.
Whether you like her splintered style or not, you will never get bored watching Julie Snyder. Yes, she sometimes eludes it directly, but she embraces it, substitutes herself, and does it. Julie Snyder doesn’t make flat screen TVs. She is a worker.
Last year, the 55-year-old hostess placed her wax statue in front of the mansion of ‘tycoon’ James Awad, aka the organizer of the infamous Sunwing flight. Returning from vacation, she led a demonstration outside the New York office of Rolling Stone magazine to defend Celine Dion’s honor.
And in the midst of the net war, Julie Snyder dedicated long sections to Radio-Canada’s news service headliners, namely Anne-Marie Dussault, Patrice Roy and Céline Galipeau. You wouldn’t see this kind of maneuver on any other channel, shall we say.
Rumor has it that Noovo will be releasing new fiction series in its weekly 9 p.m. slot this fall. Meanwhile, Julie Snyder will appear in the second season of her reality show Le Jour J, which Canal Vie will air in the spring.
“On D-Day, I’m the Kim Kardashian of the poor,” laughs Julie Snyder.
Would his banker agree with this statement?