MONTREAL – Vidéotron has decided it wants its own House of Cards. The cable company announced on Monday that it has commissioned Blue Moon, an original military-themed drama starring Karine Vanasse, which will be offered exclusively to subscribers of Illico Club Unlimited starting in 2016.
The French-language series, about a woman who inherits her father’s private security firm, will be 10 episodes of about an hour (they haven’t settled on an exact episode length yet), with a commitment for a second 10-episode series. It will be written by Luc Dionne, produced by Fabienne Larouche (the same producer behind hit series like Unité 9, Trauma and 30 Vies) and directed by Yves-Christian Fournier.
(In photo, from left, director Yves-Christian Fournier, actress Karine Vanasse, writer Luc Dionne and producer Fabienne Larouche at the announcement of the new series at Videotron's headquarters in Montreal. Photo by Steve Faguy.)
Illico Club Unlimited is Quebec’s answer to Netflix, an online subscription video-on-demand service that is available to anyone in Quebec and Ontario, regardless of whether they’re Videotron subscribers or even in its service area. It offers mainly French-language content because of the high price of English-language programming. There’s currently no plan to translate the series, but it hasn’t been ruled out either.
With about 180,000 subscribers paying $9.99 a month (basic math tells us that means Illico is bringing in more than $20 million in revenue a year), “the table was set for this sort of project,” said Myrianne Collin, senior vice president, strategy & marketing for Videotron. The company didn’t put a dollar figure on the series.
France Lauzière, senior vice president of Contenu QMI, which handles programming for Videotron and Groupe TVA, said Larouche approached them with the series, and “we saw right away a strong potential. You read the synopsis and it’s like go to the next one, the next one.”
The series will be produced with binge-watching in mind. “The writing has to be tight,” Larouche said. “You always have to be coherent.”
Club Illico has had exclusives before. Last year the Quebec drama Mensonges premiered on the service before it was aired on Quebecor-owned addikTV. And the translated version of CBS’s Under The Dome debuted on it before being broadcast by TVA. But this is the first time the service has created its own exclusive series.
The series will be exclusive to Club Illico for at least a year. “After that, we’ll see” if it gets broadcast on other channels, Lauzière said.
Vanasse, who stars in the ABC series Revenge, said producer Disney didn’t want her accepting a role in another TV series, but eventually relented because Blue Moon is in French and the shooting schedules don’t interfere. She said she hasn’t been told if Revenge will return for another season.
