With Terminal Jamel Debbouze returns to his first love

“A dream that I have cherished for years”: 25 years after H, Jamel Debbouze returns to the neglected genre of the sitcom by directing Terminal, a series filmed in public for Canal and notably embodied by his sidekick in the cult hospital series, Ramzy Bedia . This time, no nurses or stretcher bearers among the characters but the employees of a low-cost airline, Flywingz, whose pilot is "the most incompetent in the history of French aviation", says Jamel Debbouze, about the character of Ramzy Bedia... or even the flight attendants, cabin manager and steward played among others by Camille Chamoux, Tristan Lopin and Brahim Bouhlel. The choice of the airport as a playground “seemed obvious to us”, explained the comedian during a press conference at the Canneseries festival, where Terminal was screened opening on Friday, two weeks before its launch on the channel encrypted on April 22. “It’s a place of passage where all origins, all generations, all social classes, it’s really a crossroads,” he added.

As for H, the 12 episodes of the series, lasting around twenty minutes, were filmed in front of an audience of 150 people whose laughter can be heard at each line, in the pure tradition of sitcoms (situation comedies) invented there is over 70 years old in the United States, with their recurring settings and characters. A genre in which Jamel Debbouze, marked by his experience in H, “dreamed” of embarking again. “It’s a bit of filmed theater. For an actor, it's extraordinary because we get feedback from the public. “It was a somewhat unattainable dream” but Canal “made it possible”, rejoiced the director, who also appears in the series in the role of a security chief addicted to tasers. “It was a big challenge from a technical and artistic point of view as well,” argued its co-director, Mohamed Hamidi. “What’s interesting about a sitcom, for us,” is that it “is right at the center” of the two disciplines of cinema and stage, he added. Very funny, the series was co-written in particular by the screenwriters of Validé Xavier Lacaille (Parlement) and Giulio Callegari, or even Clémence Dargent (Ovni(s), Bis Repetita). It remains to be seen whether French audiences are ready for the return of the traditional sitcom format, which disappeared from French production around the same time as the end of “H” in 2002.