Everything is fine, the Disney Plus series that does good (review)

The drama of cancer told like an ordinary tragedy. A poignant and sweet family chronicle.

Talk about leukemia without falling into the frightening and unbearable. This is the challenge of this modern fable written with great accuracy by Camille de Castelnau. The screenwriter of Legends Office – and who recently worked on Funny – finds Eric Rochantdirector and producer of Everything is finea family chronicle inspired by a true story.

An ordinary family story, struck by the extraordinarily unfair, when little Rose, 13, finds herself in the hospital waiting for a transplant, the last hope in her fight against a nasty blood cancer. Despite the anguish, the suffering, the struggles, we must continue to live, to exist, so as not to let ourselves be crushed by insurmountable pain.

It is this daily life, worn out by illness, that Everything is fine succeeds magnificently in describing. How bonds are strengthened or damaged under the weight of drama. Without ever falling into plaintive tragedy, avoiding the pitfall of a series that is too heavy to bear, Camille de Castelnau knows how to infuse a lot of warmth into her story, which she constructed as a gentle drama, drawing each member of the family with great care. Always taking a step aside to remain in an emotion with which we can identify, the writing masterfully passes through the evidence of pathos, to find its tone, sometimes improbable.

And all this works because the casting has grasped the particularity of the scripts of Camille de Castelnau. From Bernard Le Coq to Alyosha Schneider, everyone finds their place, with Virginie Efira perfect as the leader of a broken family, for her very first major series.

Obviously, we quickly understand that everything is not going so well and that misfortune is never very far away. It is often poignant, sometimes harsh and heartbreaking. But with hindsight and a well-delivered form of philosophy, the series constantly manages to remain emotional, without ever sinking into brutal melancholy.