It’s spring break, let’s step aside and surface the subject: let’s talk about the paré.
Posted at 5:00 am
Not long ago, Radio-Canada announced that to celebrate La petite vie’s 30th anniversary, its Tou.tv platform would be delivering six episodes of the cult series. The good news made headlines in one of those raptures Quebec is capable of, because Claude Meunier’s saga is much more than a historical soap opera.
Born in 1993, the 59-episode series only lasted four seasons. Four short years but 30 years of methodical service. The episodes have become classics of our television. In 1995, one episode drew 4,098,000 viewers in Quebec City of 7.2 million! Ratings for covers so newly rehashed that certain lines are known by heart remain spectacular three decades later. One can imagine that young people born after the original excursion are still discovering the paré that immigrants perfected their Quebecois there.
La petite vie was and is a television phenomenon. At a time when young audiences are turning away from television, this fixation on the imaginary life of the average Quebecois all-wool family is surprising. Because La petite vie is not television, but a social phenomenon.
What did Meunier tell us 30 years ago? He drew an impressionistic, fatalistic and clear portrait of a society at the beginning of great changes, in which the family would be the first to break up. A Quebec that was nearing the end of its silent revolution’s useful life, where the models would be bullied.
A Quebec where the traditional family, even a poached one, was briefly the dominant model, where slightly racist, slightly homophobic mononics told their jokes in public, where children still adored their parents but turned out to be more curious, more adventurous than this . Families where, despite the ongoing feminist revolution, the patriarchal model still prevailed.
Stumbling upon an episode of La petite vie on a Saturday night can come as quite a shock! First there is the dose of nostalgia for what we were as a collective, or rather for the exaggerated portrait Meunier painted of it: simple, good-natured, a little stunned by the changes knocking on our door.
The Quebec of 1995 is still homogeneous but has just closed a nationalist chapter in its history. We cling to these parés, which are like a caricature of a US in the process of being watered down. Sociology, I tell you.
What does Claude Meunier have in store for you in 2023? The characters will have aged, we know that Môman will be absent, Serge Thériault suffers from severe depression. Since the author remains discreet about what the present holds for paré, we can have fun speculating…
They still live in a central Montreal neighborhood, probably in the gentrified Rosemont. Patriarch Ti-Mé’s obsession with trash finally comes into its own in these times of environmental concern. Pôpa, neighbor of Valérie Plante, became a very prominent local councilor for Projet Montréal; a pioneer. His son Rénald, former manager of Caisse, is no longer a miser, but a follower of the decline, which finally brings him closer to his father. As for Rod, obsessed with the look, he would have become a guru of recycling and upcycling, ambassador of thrift stores and arbiter of second-hand elegance, incorporating his sister-in-law, the monochrome Lison, into his social approach .
Thérèse, the Chinese cake neurotic, has finally made it since she went vegan. She is also a TikTok influencer: Miss Chickpea. Once a forward-thinking activist in search of identity, Caro is the one who creates openness to difference as the Parés now navigate the turbulent waters of political correctness. Lots of misunderstandings and excuses in sight…
Môman’s case is complex.
where did she go Forgotten at Fleury Hospital? Elected to the National Assembly? Sociologically, her disappearance from her homeland has a certain meaning: she left the family, unnerved. She is an exhausted mother. She’s finally embraced the biggest changes: she’s fluent and left to live her binary somewhere else.
These six episodes come at a time when television is crammed with reruns. You might even think that television is rambling. This is not the case: look at the amazing number of new (and excellent) series coming up on all networks. We were almost running out of actors! So it’s not a TV rerun, but a whole society that feels the need to take stock. Everything goes so fast, everything has changed so much in the last 30 years that the Paré are like roadside markers measuring the distance traveled.
These new adventures therefore turn out to be an anticipated treat, but also a service to the public. (That’s why Tou.tv is pretty greedy to make us pay twice…)