Boris 4

Synopsis

Boris. More than ten years have passed and everything has changed. DyingmainstreamTV – with its good doctors and anti-druglectures – is even more dying, and even René and his friends are now working for a Global streaming Platform. This time, the series that René ssetto shoot is“Life ofJesus”, from an idea by Stanis La Rochelle, who will not only play the role of the main character,who famously died at 33even ifheis50, but also that of producer, with hisSNIP(So Not ItalianProduction). Stanis founded it with Corinna, who has also been his wife for the past few years. Thewriting of“Vita di Gesù”wascommittedto the usual three screenwriters.Lopez,who retired from theNetworkandhas reinventedhimself as a producer with his QQQ (Quality, Quality, Quality)is the co-producer andcoordinator. The opportunity not to be missed is that the major EuropeanstreamingPlatform is seriously considering the project,but before the finalgreenlight,Algorithm’s approval ofthe scripts (the “lock”) is needed. Everythingseems to be going well but whatitwillmeanworkingunder this newowner? Will René be able to take advantage of the new opportunity tofinallyshoot ahigh-qualityseries, but more importantly, will our people be able to adapt to the world that haschanged so rapidly?

Director's note

To do a new Boris season without Mattia seemed crazy to us. He is part of us and part of the series. But when Lorenzo proposed it to us we thought about it. And we went over all the joking around we had done with him about a possible new season. And the notes made us laugh and cry at the same time. We did it and we hope with all our hearts that he likes it.

Italy is the exact opposite of King Midas.

Boris ten years later...

We asked ourselves “is it still possible to tell the story of a crew filming a traditional national-popular drama in 2022? Does it still have satirical impact? Does it capture the mood of our time?”. Our answer was that we had to change. To preserve the intimate nature of Boris we had to have the courage to change many things.

When Boris was first made, it told the story of René and his ramshackle team, sentenced to make ‘the worst TV in the world in the country that watches the most television in the world’. When Boris - The Series saw the light, generalist TV was at its apogee. A few years earlier ‘Big Brother’ had appeared, which demonstrated the maximum power of that model, based on the ‘date with the programme’. And in Italy the prime minister was a television tycoon. Talking about TV automatically meant talking about the workings of the world, doing satire.

But in the last ten years, the landscape has changed a lot. TV has lost a lot of its power and is no longer the centre of communication. Today in TV series we talk about huge success for numbers that would have been ridiculous ten years ago. Two fundamental things have happened: the weight has shifted from the appointment to content and then these new contents have had to take on, if possible, an international appeal.

And this has happened because of the gradual rise of platforms worldwide, Pandora’s boxes of all possible types of content, which can be accessed at any time.

So it goes without saying that this has changed everything.

And in Italy? It has happened here too, but with mixed fortunes, because for mysterious reasons we cannot seem to keep up with foreign productions. At least as far as TV series are concerned, in Italy we are like King Midas in reverse.

In 2022, could Boris still attack good old-fashioned, soothing and intimately ‘Christian Democrat’ family TV (since that TV is still being made, it has by no means disappeared)? The answer we gave ourselves was that it would have been like shooting at the Red Cross.

Hence the need to change some basic assumptions, and renew the challenge. Both ours - as authors - and those the characters are called on to tackle.

Somehow we had to land our unlikely protagonists in today’s international production salon: the Platform.

It was not an easy challenge. We had to give all the characters a plausible evolution. Not to mention the bereavement that sadly hit the cast: the departure in 2019 of the irreplaceable, wonderful Roberta Fiorentini, Itala. Instead, we somehow had to talk about that too. In a sitcom.

Can you make all these changes and not displease everyone? We don't know, but we’ve given it our best shot.