The HPI TV series

Saturday, June 11^th, 2022

HPI is a crime-comedy (seemingly that’s how the genre is called) TV series that premiered a year ago on TF1 (the main French TV channel), and is currently on its second season (specifically, as of when I’m writing this, on a cliffhanger that precedes the season finale).

It has been dubbed in Italian, Spanish, German, and probably also Portuguese, Dutch and Polish, but I’m not assured of these because in parts of Europe, subtitling movies instead of dubbing them is common. It has begun airing in many European and Latin American countries.

News about its arrival started to surface (or at least to reach me) in early 2021, and I expected it, initially to be terrible. I think a lot of people did. You don’t expect French TV to cover a subject (any subject) tactfully.

However, on April 29, 2021, the premiere dropped, and it was actually really good. In fact, it became my favorite current TV show in all categories. Perhaps the only thing I even watch on TV anymore. 

Basically, it’s about Morgane Alvaro, a single mom who works as of the first episode as a housemaid in a police precinct, but gets noticed by the police for being extremely smart. Despite her own distaste for cops, she starts working as a consultant, in exchange for the police reopening the case of the mysterious disappearance of her eldest daughter’s father.

I love crime fiction in general (it’s one of the few fiction genres I’m still invested in), but HPI is particularly good.

And yet, I kept on seeing tons of criticism, and especially criticism in the press from gifted people who were qualifying it as “bad representation”. One particularly striking example was the interview by the Huffington Post of one guy from TPMP (a trash tv program), himself a gifted adult and a full 3-adherent (I’ll keep using those shorthand numbers). It’s all “the subject shouldn’t be treated with humor”, “a zebra’s logic cannot be logical”, “Morgane being able to explain her reasoning when she solves crime but not when she sees red numbers is a plot hole” (it’s called Synæsthesia, it means you literally see colored numbers. It’s not a reasoning or a mnemotechnic. But the guy makes it clear that no zebra character should be able to explain any thought ever.) And, obviously, “being gifted is sad and a disorder and a curse.”

But wait he also says “every zebra is different” so none of those overgeneralizations matters!

Ugh this was infuriating to reread. This guy has cursed me to think the word “zebra” is cringe again for the next few days.

But back to this “bad rep” idea. In this essay I’ll be demonstrating

Why HPI is actually good rep

Firstly, the most common criticism addressed to HPI is that Morgane is a walking stereotype. And I don’t understand this one at all.

Morgane has basically nothing in common with any of the gifted stereotypes I know of.

Compare with another series with a vaguely similar premise: Scorpion.

I liked Scorpion and I wish it could get renewed, but the characters were all stereotypes, to varying degrees. Walter in an extreme way. I know Walter is based on a real person, but that doesn’t stop him from being a terrible character.

The characters all have so much childhood trauma that they bring up constantly. They’re all kind of aliens (for Christ’s sake they need an “interpret” to communicate with The Normals, that’s why they hire Paige in the first place!) and all very emotionally stunted (they have a low EQ, whatever that means). They’re all representants of different fields of STEM. They all have IQ numbers that don’t even exist (even worse with Ralph who’s straight up in the 200s). Also the whole subplot with Collins, and the thing where if Walter and Collins are left together for too long they become mad geniuses and forget to feed because they’re too absorbed in The Science. What’s up with that. Scorpion is good fiction, but it is bad rep.

Morgane gets called a stereotype because she dresses in bad taste and is too rebellious. Which aren’t at all stereotypes! No one ever thinks “oh a gifted person. I’m sure she’ll have bad taste and be rebellious”. Those are the last things people think. 

Morgane is a complete opposite of that. We know basically nothing about her childhood (as of episode 2.7, the future might prove me wrong), she makes no references to it. She’s defined by who she is in the present. We don’t know either whether she studied. 

She’s portrayed as very rebellious, as in, that’s her personality. No one claims in the series that all gifted people are rebellious. She’s a fun and jovial person, and when she’s sad, it’s because of issues happening with her life, not because she’s desperate that normo-thinkers will never understand her (it’s ok if you’re desperate about that while in your teens, but if you still think that way at 40 there’s reasons to be worried). She doesn’t conform to the rigid structure of the police, but it doesn’t mean she’s unable to function in a society, in fact it’s made clear that she’s better than the cops at connecting with people (due to being a civilian). 

She’s had a lot of interests, and that’s the main way she collected all of the bits of knowledge she uses on cases. 

She’s very OK with who she is, and that’s good! Again, it shows that a lot of criticism comes from a 3-background. 

I agree wholeheartedly with Chloé Romengas’s take, that is, that the series shouldn’t have been named after giftedness, to make it clear that Morgane isn’t all gifted people, she’s her own person. There’s one other zebra on the show: her middle son, Elliott. Typically, gifted kids in fiction are seen wholly in relation to their school life, but Elliott isn’t (obviously, the series is about his mom): he’s mostly seen at home, having many interests (that aren’t all STEM-related) and changing interests every week or so. Which is honestly a perfectly good portrayal.

Morgane’s a synæsthete (it happens, I know gifted synæsthetes IRL), but she’s not as much unsaid things as most others. Basically, every gifted character on TV has been written as an autistic character with plausible deniability for the past while (Sheldon Cooper types). They do this so they can get away with doing jokes at the expense of autistic people. And it results in even more gifted/autistic confusion in the popular mind. Morgane isn’t that, which is refreshing too.

Giftedness itself is hardly mentioned past the first episode, which is ok with me. I don’t actually believe that TF1 should be doing the awareness raising about this, and it’s a good thing they didn’t try.

If you speak any of the languages the series is available in, and you like crime fiction, I strongly recommend HPI. The Italian network RAI has made available an audio-only version of the Italian dub with narration, and it’s really good. A decent way to enjoy the show even. Although you should ultimately watch it (if you can) visually, because visually speaking a lot of really good work has been done. TF1 is kind of flexing how much property they own at this point, kind of like what Disney does sometimes.

As I’ve told you we’re in the middle of a cliffhanger rn, I’ll have a hard time waiting for the finale. Some people have already seen it because it’s on the Salto streaming service, but thankfully few people have Salto. France is a fairly archaic country audiovisually, Cable TV was never popular and most people had only access to five channels until the late 2000s.

Thomas