The series, launched in 2015 on France Télévision on an idea of the former agent Dominique Besnehard, and which is triumphing today on the American platform Netflix, won the prize for best comedy by the academy at the International Emmy Awards which rewards for half a century the best television productions outside the United States.
The writers and producers of “Ten Percent”, renamed “Call my Agent” in the United States, were in New York for the occasion, and first three seasons writer Fanny Herrero praised the show’s success. “really traveled the world thanks to Netflix so that’s a nice accomplishment”.
In an interview Monday morning with AFP, Mr. Besnehard saw the success of “French touch” in the United States, in the lineage of French cinema from “François Truffaut or Michel Deville” who successfully showed Americans “a tragicomic, funny France”.
Over four seasons, the series follows the destiny of a small Parisian agency, ASK, where viewers discover the vagaries and difficulties of this shadowy profession, at the service of actors and actresses. With this particularity: in each episode, the real stars play their own role with a good dose of humor and self-mockery.
For Fanny Herrero, the series is certainly “quite French but not only”. “It’s a bit worked with an American spirit. We have sometimes compared it to comedies à la Lubitsch which are fanciful. Self-mockery is not so French”, she explains to AFP.
For the author, the success of the series “it is the graft of an efficiency, a writing and a fabrication coming from the United States and our French obsessions and neuroses, our messy and touching side”.
On the red carpet in New York, producer Michel Feller admitted that “the broadcast on Netflix of the four seasons allowed us with a production, we will say local, to be seen in more than 200 territories”.
“Today there are almost 20 remakes that have been signed, are in production or have been shot”, especially in Canada and India, he detailed, Mr. Besnehard confirming that a season 5 would see the light of day, first in the form of a feature film.
Another award for French people is the documentary “Kubrick by Kubrick” awarded in the “artistic programming” category of the International Emmy Awards. “Enormous!”, “Unbelievable!” producer Martin Laurent and director Grégory Monro exulted in front of AFPTV.
The film, produced among others by Arte and which had been selected at the Tribeca festival in New York in 2020 – canceled due to the pandemic – is built on “exceptional audio tape materials” very rare interviews of American director Stanley Kubrick with French film journalist Michel Ciment.
The filmmaker, who died in 1999, was “the mysterious man who does not give himself up”, considers Martin Laurent and this documentary only on archives, designed more for cinema than for television, is intended “to humanize”, adds Grégory Monro.
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