Writer wunderkind Simon Boulerice’s Getting Under Your Skin has been greenlit for a second season, Zero3 vice-president of fiction development, creation, and production Dominique Veillet told Variety in advance of a Quebec showcase at the Series Mania Forum. 

The Montreal high school-set undercover drama is one of seven series in the Coming Next From Quebec panel that are seeking market traction in Lille.

The first episode premieres this week on Quebec’s TV5, which greenlit Season 2. 

Season 1 of the eight-part series, each 24 minutes,  follows Gaspard (Félix-Antoine Bénard), a queer teenage crime-show fan, as he befriends and infiltrates the life of a young police officer (Anthony Therrien) who has disguised himself as a student to investigate a drug-dealing network with connections to organized crime.   

Bénard is best known for his lead performance in the multi-award-winning 2023 Venice Days head-turner Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, and Therrien for his work in three seasons of the French-language Canadian version of The Red Band Society. Both actors are returning for season 2 of Getting Under Your Skin.

“At a time when synthetic drugs are circulating more widely and becoming increasingly insidious, the series takes on a timely and urgent issue,” says Veillet, who produced Season 1 with Caroline Langlois. 

“What makes the show unique is its hybrid nature, blending a coming-of-age story with a crime drama,” says series director Éric Piccoli, who has been tapped for Season 2. “When those worlds collide, the result is a refreshing and intriguing tale that quickly draws us in and creates a strong emotional connection to the characters.”  

Script work is already underway for the second season, and Montreal screenwriter Boulerice—a playwright, poet and children’s author, who is also a co-creator and co-writer on Coming Next From Quebec series “Take Care”—is leading his student and cop characters into darker terrain. 

 “My wish is to see Gaspard again a year and a half later, now in CEGEP (pre-university college) and unwittingly caught up, through a series of events, in a situation just as toxic as in Season 1: a juvenile prostitution ring operating in certain bars in the Gay Village,” he tells Variety. “It is in this context that he reconnects with Thomas, who has returned to the world of undercover work.” 

Getting Under Your Skin is repped at Series Mania by Mélanie Ratte of Sphere Abacus.