Dr. Suzanne Bien-Aimé, played by series creator Florence Longpré, is one of Quebec’s most memorable small-screen protagonists.Crave
Empathie, the most fearlessly original, operatically emotional show on Canadian television right now, comes to the end of its triumphant, tear-jerking first season Thursday on Crave.
Dr. Suzanne Bien-Aimé, played by series creator Florence Longpré, has already entered the ranks of Quebec’s most memorable small-screen protagonists.
A criminologist turned psychiatrist with a backstory of compounded tragedy, she works in a hybrid of a prison and hospital evaluating and treating patients found not criminally responsible of all sorts of horrendous acts.
At work, the ultracompetent Suzanne is pretty much the living embodiment of empathy – which you don’t need to have gone through French immersion to know is the title of the show.
But when Longpré, 42, began developing her first solo scripted series – after well-received co-written efforts such as M’entends-tu? and Audrey est revenue – her original idea was pretty much the opposite of the dramedy she ended up creating, which won the audience award at the Series Mania festival in France before its simultaneous premiere in French and with English subtitles on Crave in April.
To begin with, Longpré wanted to write a TV show about a psychopath – a person with a complete lack of empathy.
Lucky for viewers who see that subject area as one of diminishing returns – I’ll put my hand up; I’m done with Dexter and his denomination – she hit a dramatic dead end.
Dr. Suzanne Bien-Aimé (played by Florence Longpré) is often accompanied by Mortimer, a sweet security guard (played by French stand-up Thomas Ngijol) who must be present with her during all sessions with her potentially violent patients.Crave
“It was very boring to write about that,” Longpré said in a phone interview that bounced back and forth between English and French. “One day I called my producer and I said: Je vais recommencer.”
While Longpré did indeed restart, during her research she had already discovered the unusual setting for Empathie.
The fictional Mont-Royal Psychiatric Institute, where Suzanne returns to work after two years of grief-fuelled unemployment, is a place for individuals who have been found not criminally responsible or are waiting for psychiatrists to determine whether they are fit to stand trial. It’s based in part based on Montreal’s Institut Philippe-Pinel, which is home to a pair of psychiatrists who reviewed Longpré’s scripts for accuracy.
While being found not criminally responsible may strike some as a get-out-of-jail-free card, secure custody or detention in a hospital can be tougher to endure than a prison sentence.
“There are people who don’t know when they’re going to leave. It’s very troubling for those people to not know if they’re going to get better,” Longpré said.
The uncertain timeline for healing and rehabilitation makes Empathie’s subject impossible to depict in a case-of-the-week procedural – though when Longpré was shopping around the scenario, some producers and networks tried to get her to reshape it into one.
In the end, Longpré found an artistically simpatico team on the French-language side of Crave.
Monsieur Dallaire – played by legendary comic actor Benoît Brière – is one of Suzanne’s cases that spans the first season. His story begins with hallucinations that insulate him from his environment, but with a change in medication and approach he becomes more grounded.
The downside to making actual human connections for Dallaire is that doing so forces him to live in the reality of the hurt he experienced as a child – and the fact that his actions left someone dead.
Empathie is unpredictable not only in terms of where patients’ stories begin or end, but in how much each episode does or does not delve into the outside lives of both Suzanne and her colleague, Mortimer, a sweet security guard (played by French stand-up Thomas Ngijol) who must be present with her during all sessions with her potentially violent patients.
Suzanne’s own story – filled with unimaginable tragedy and struggles with sobriety – sometimes threatens to topple over melodrama, but never does.
Longpré worried about this herself at times. Take for instance the fact that, as a baby, Suzanne was found in a dumpster by a lawyer named Guylène Bien-Aimé (Linda Malo), who eventually adopted her. Just as she was about to lock this story element in, Longpré had second thoughts: “I was like, oh my god, I think it’s too much.”
But Empathie’s director, Guillaume Lonergan (a long-time collaborator), persuaded her to not back down from it or other big choices.
Another element that shouldn’t work but does is the way ballet dancers will sometimes invade scenes in startling choreography by Étienne Delorme of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens.
“When I was speaking with the psychiatrists, they were always referring to balance and unbalance, and I was trying to find a cinematographic way to speak about that,” Longpré explained.
On the strength of Empathie, Longpré recently signed with Curate, a boutique management agency that also represents novelist Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven) and TV writer Jac Schaeffer (Agatha All Along). She is developing her first English series and a bilingual movie with director Annie St-Pierre for Max Films.
But first there will surely be second season of Empathie, which has regularly hit the top five overall on Crave while competing against international shows such as The White Lotus and The Last of Us. “I cannot tell,” Longpré said – but it was clear by her tone there’s another rush of empathy on the way.