Aahana Swrup
The Netflix French comedy series ‘Flunked’ (Originally titled ‘Recalé’) takes the audience back to high school in an unhinged fashion. The story’s protagonist, Eddy, is a numbers genius and a petty scammer. As a result, it’s only a matter of time before he ends up in handcuffs, sitting across from a detective, Lucie, who quotes him a seven-year sentence for his crimes. However, she also offers him the chance of a lifetime: escape legal ramifications in exchange for working a case with her.
Therefore, Eddy finds himself going undercover at a high school as a substitute math teacher. His mission is to find the secret kid of a notoriously elusive drug lord, Sagirov. However, as he continues to build lie upon lie to keep his cover and complete his assignment, his attachment to the students and his fellow teachers gets unexpectedly out of hand. Despite its comedic foundation, the show hits a few marks of realism through its character and world-building.
The Fictional Premise of Flunked Has Realistic Research Behind it
The storylines and characters in ‘Flunked’ remain confined within the premises of its narrative, subsequently retaining fictitious origins. The show centers around an outlandish plot where a lowlife criminal gets roped into helping a law enforcement agent with her rogue investigation into a high-profile drug dealer. As a result of the same, he has to go undercover in a high school where his main task is to identify and shadow a teenager who was connected to the target criminal. Given the eccentric nature of this premise, it’s no surprise that the show doesn’t take any direct inspiration from real-life criminal cases or investigations.
All the characters, including the central duo Eddie and Lucie, are fictitious elements created in service of the story. The story’s foundation itself shares some resemblance to the 1990 film directed by Ivan Reitman, ‘Kindergarten Cop.’ In the film, a tough cop goes undercover as a kindergarten teacher, and hilarity ensues. Nonetheless, save for some surface-level similarities, there’s nothing to suggest ‘Flunked’ took any inspiration from the 90’s comedy film. Thus, it remains a product of the creativity of showrunner François Uzan and his team of screenwriters, which included Cascales Emma and Anne-Lise Rivoire.
In a conversation with Deadline, Uzan spoke about the hands-on approach he took to the research required for this project. He shared, “I wanted to have some social roots for Recalé, so I went undercover in a lycée in France. I told teachers that this will be about infiltration and [will be] goofy, but when we see teachers on screen, I want them to be realistic. So [‘Flunked’] will talk about what it means to be a teacher right now, problems of budget, what it means to be on strike, how hard it is to deal with kids, and, more importantly, parents.” Ultimately, this desire to bring authenticity ot the characters and their narratives despite the freedoms afforded by the genre allows ‘Funked’ to find a grounding sense of realism.
Flunked Highlights the Realistic Plights of Modern-Day Educators
Although ‘Flunked’ sports a crime-focused plotline, the core of the series revolves around Eddy’s journey as an educator. Even though the protagonist initially has no real interest in the profession, with time, he begins to see the merits and personal gratifications of shaping and guiding young minds. Therefore, somewhere along the line, he develops another personal mission: helping out the faculty at Charles Baudelaire High School. His most prominent foray into doing this stems from the inadvertent activist persona he takes on as Fish Teacher by donning a FishFace mask to hide his identity on national television. In real life, no such activist with a fish-themed secret identity exists.
Nonetheless, through his work as the Fish Teacher, Eddy manages to bring crucial issues in the education system to light. He talks about underfunded public schools, lack of maintenance and updates in the buildings, and a shortage in resources made available to the educators. Reportedly, salaries of French teachers continue to fall below the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average. Educators are chronically underpaid and largely undervalued in the education sector. In fact, in 2023, voluntary departures of teachers from the industry reached unprecedented heights with 2,411, or 0.34%, of the workforce choosing to walk away from the profession. Through Eddy’s storyline, ‘Flunked’ underlines the issues that make an educator’s job challenging and difficult on a concerning level. As such, even without a direct realistic basis to its narrative, the show manages to present an authentic story.
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