Plus belle la vie

The initial working title planned for the series was 'Mistral gagnant' before it became 'Plus belle la vie'.

The show's initial funding was partly supported by FASILD and later Acsé, following an inter-ministerial integration committee agreement with France 3, set up after Jean-Marie Le Pen's qualification for the second round of the 2002 French presidential election.

The Mistral neighborhood set was designed by Michel Blaise and built at the Pôle média de la Belle de Mai studios in Marseille, inspired by the real Marseille district of Le Panier.

Filming an episode requires about 1 hour 15 minutes of makeup for women and 45 minutes for men, and outdoor scenes are often disrupted by strong winds hitting the port of Marseille.

Five episodes are filmed each week with a six-to-eight week lead time before broadcast, using three cameras (including one steadicam) and two separate directing teams, one for interior scenes and one for exterior scenes.

Filming began on 5 July 2004 at the Belle de Mai studios, and from 2017 onward Provence Studios and natural locations around Martigues (parks, beaches, and seafront) became regular filming sites.

Production of season 16 was temporarily halted by the Covid-19 pandemic, forcing France 3 to stop broadcasting new episodes between 1 May and 29 June 2020 due to a lack of unaired material, filling the gap with reruns of season 11.

Because director and screenwriter Olivier Szulzynger is from the Pyrénées-Orientales region, many recurring and secondary characters are named after villages near Perpignan, such as Estève, Cabestany, Tautavel, and Carcassonne.

Screenwriters often wrote scenes referencing real current events, including the Mediator drug scandal (via the fictional Tamiflex storyline) and the French shale gas moratorium (via the fictional MédiaGaz storyline).

For the episode broadcast the day after the 2007 and 2012 French presidential elections, the production filmed two alternate versions of the same scene in advance, one for each possible election outcome, since the episodes had to air discussing the result the following day.

Several guest stars appeared playing themselves, including telephone game show pioneer Pierre Bellemare, singer Tal for the show's 10th anniversary, and former model Adriana Karembeu for a month-long storyline in season 18.

A number of guest actors were primarily known as French dubbing voices, such as Benoît Allemane (the French voice of Morgan Freeman), who played René Cassagne in season 4, and Virginie Ledieu (the French voice of Meg Ryan), who played Agnès Revel in seasons 4 to 6.

On 11 July 2008, Plus belle la vie became the first French television series to reach its 1000th episode, a milestone celebrated with a new opening theme performed by Jessica Flores.

Despite declining live TV ratings, an October 2015 Hadopi study found Plus belle la vie to be the most-watched series via streaming in France, ahead of Game of Thrones.

On 28 March 2012, an episode drew an average of 6.2 million viewers with a peak of 7.3 million in its final minutes, setting an audience record for the show after airing right after TF1's evening news.