French in Action is an American-French TV series co-produced by WGBH Boston, Yale University and Wellesley College as part of a French language course developed by Pierre Capretz.
The series focuses on teaching French grammar and vocabulary with glimpses of French life and culture. These lessons are implemented into a fictitious love story between American exchange student Robert (Charles Mayer) and French college student Mireille (Valérie Allain).
Un trope. Les tropes. Un trope. Les tropes.
NB: In keeping with the theme of French in Action, the trope names have been translated into French.- Chaque épisode a la même fin: All episodes (excluding the premiere and final episode) featured a Guignot puppet show recapping the episode's events.
- Éducation et divertissement: As mentioned above, French In Action combines education on the French language with a fictitious romantic storyline about Robert and Mireille.
- Un épisode avec de nombreux segments: Some of the lessons span between two and five episodes each depending on the subject matter.
- Un imbécile français: Played straight and literally with Hubert (Franck de la Personne) as a rival for Robert's affection with Mireille.
- Un jeu de rôle: One segment encourages viewers to repeat spoken lines from the story as if conversing with another character in that story.
- Un jeune frère ennuyeux: Marie-Laure (Virginie Contesse), younger sister of Mireille.
- Micro-trottoir: Some episodes feature interviews with the French public, with particular focus on the episodes' themes or key words.
- Les premiers épisodes semblent bizarres: Early episodes started with a classroom segment where Pierre Capretz explained the episode's concept to a room of students. Later episodes omitted the classroom segment and went straight to the story.
- Répètez après moi: Repetition is the key factor of the French in Action course, covering repetition of words (short and long form), sentence structures and dialogue from the episodes' stories.
- Sans le quatrième mur:
- During the classroom segments, Pierre Capretz addresses the viewers through the camera during his class segments.
- In the segment where some of the story's dialogue is repeated for viewers to say the same line, characters sometimes speak directly to the camera as though the viewer was the other character repeating those lines.
