School supplies are stacked on the table, schoolbags ready to be filled. In the Gonzalez kitchen, three teenagers and their mother are busy before the return of the five little brothers and sisters: the next day, in the middle of the school year, college students will change establishments. The trio, so far educated in the public, where it does not “was not going very well”, goes private during the year. The pressure is mounting for 12-year-old Hugo, a sweatshirt and a ponytail, who pouts at the idea of ​​having to remove his earring. “I want them to start off on a good footing, it’s over, we’re not having fun anymore, that’s good, we’re going to work”justifies the mother, furtively looking up at the camera.

Because the scene, banal, takes place under the eye of hundreds of thousands of viewers. Welcome to Châtellerault (Vienne) with Mélanie and Franck Gonzalez, both 38 years old, eight children, including six boys and two girls, aged from one to 16 years old. It is one of the tribes of the program “Large families: life in XXL”, back from Monday, November 28, at 5:30 p.m. on TF1. Since its launch in July 2020, the program, which follows families with at least five children (up to eleven) in their daily lives, has attracted 1.4 million viewers on average. The target, the woman in charge of purchases under 50 (the new, more politically correct, “housewife under 50”), bit: the show advanced the first channel’s time slot by 11 points .

In January 2020, the TF1 group launched in parallel on TFX “Moms & famous”, a program this time centered on the daily life of famous mothers – whose barometer of celebrity is measured by the yardstick of the number of subscribers they have on social networks, displayed just under their name as a pledge – with a promise enticing: “They won’t hide anything from you. » The casting is done in the pool of candidates for reality TV shows. There too, the public is at the rendezvous: the program becomes the “best docu-reality channel on the time slot with the target of women purchasing managers under 50”according to the audiovisual group.

Our life, only better

Two years earlier, the M6 ​​group had chosen to focus on unknown mothers (at least, at first), by launching, in May 2018 on its TNT 6ter channel, “Les Mamans”, a format from a very successful Swedish concept, “Young mothers”. On the poster, profiles representative of French society: classic heterosexual couple with two children, lesbian couple, single mother, single and multiple children, mother or child with a disability, natural or medically assisted pregnancy…

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