Radio-Canada’s director of television is swooning over her latest hire, André Béraud, who is returning from a stint in Paris to fill one of Quebec TV’s most important jobs: head of drama and feature films at SRC.

‘He’s my idol,’ Louise Lantagne told Playback at the launch of the network’s new fall lineup. ‘When he became available we just had to try to get him. He has such incredible experience and he’s very creative.’ (It’s hard to imagine a CBC executive being so gushy about a fellow colleague.)

Quebec TV adores its stars – be they producers, writers, actors or pubcaster bureaucrats – and Béraud is a rising one.

What makes the 45-year-old producer so special? Lantagne says it’s his track record. Béraud has produced some of the most original TV out of this province in the past decade. But it could also be his gender.

In Quebec, the fans of TV drama are typically women. Faced with declining audiences, SRC has been trying to seduce the elusive male thirtysomething with dramatic comedies such as Les Invincibles, about four thirtysomething boy-men; C.A., which follows the sexual adventures of urban yuppies; and Les Boys, a TV series based on the popular film franchise about a garage league hockey team. Yet at SRC, like at its rival network TVA, many of the big decision makers – especially when it comes to fiction – are women. Perhaps the pubcaster thought it was time to reverse a trend.

The principal reason Béraud was likely recruited is his track record. The son of a Haitian immigrant, he’s a McGill grad who also studied at the Peter Stark Producing Program at the University of Southern California. In 1999, he joined Montreal’s Cirrus Communications. It was there he brought to the small screen one of the province’s most acclaimed and popular programs: La Vie, la vie (Life, Life), which followed five thirtysomething friends living in Montreal’s trendy Plateau Mont-Royal neighborhood. With its cinematic, tightly edited approach the series is widely regarded as ground-breaking; it made Quebec TV more attractive to the well-educated yuppie crowd (the writers of Les Bougon, c’est aussi ça la vie [The Bougons, That’s Also Life] took a humorous stab at the show’s hip middle-class protagonists when they picked the title for their series about a working-class family of dishonest, beer-drinking Montrealers).

Béraud also produced the risky and moving prison drama Temps dur and two shows which explored, with humor and candor, the inner emotional lives of middle-class men: Hommes en quarantaine (2003) and La vie rêvée de Mario Jean (2004). He’s also behind the recent SRC hit Tout sur moi as well as the English-Canadian TV drama Naked Josh and the award-winning TV movie Sticks and Stones. Although most of his productions are critically well received, some have missed the mark with mainstream viewers.

‘I don’t know what the secret is,’ said Béraud from France, where he was vacationing before taking on his new job Sept. 28. ‘But I believe it’s the story that counts. I think people are looking for characters that touch them, that resonate with them.’

Last year, to the surprise and consternation of France’s frequently snobbish media press, the producer was recruited by France’s TF1 network to revamp its dramatic programming. One journalist dubbed him the man bent on Americanizing French TV. He left TF1in April.

Béraud says he’s sad to leave Paris, but is happy to return to Montreal, a city he adores, although he grew up in Rimouski, a town of roughly 40,000 on the south shore of the Saint-Lawrence River north-east of Quebec City. ‘My youth in Rimouski was like the Wonder Years. It was such a safe environment. It was a small community and our neighbors were like members of our extended family. It was wonderful.’

Béraud was drawn to TV as a kid watching the French translation of Bewitched. ‘I’m not part of the video generation. I grew up reading Jules Verne and Balzac. But once I understood that with TV you could create a whole make-believe universe, I wanted to get involved.’

Et cetera

• Béraud’s favorite shows: Six Feet Under, Reno 911, Big Bang Theory, Vice caché

• What turns him off a program? ‘When I feel duped. I first loved Heroes, then I was disappointed and couldn’t watch it.’

• What he drives: A 1978 Volkswagen Beatle. ‘I drive with the top down and I don’t turn on the radio. I just watch and listen to the city.

• Favorite pastime: Playing with his nephews and nieces. ‘Most kids would love me as an uncle. I love to spoil them.’