Benefiting from the huge Netflix springboard, the French series Ten percent was awarded this Monday evening at the International Emmy Awards, with the prize for best comedy for season 4, an American consecration.
The series, launched in 2015 on France Television on an idea of the former agent Dominique Besnehard, triumphs today on the American platform Netflix.
” French touch “
The writers and producers of “Ten Percent”, renamed “Call my Agent” in the United States, were in New York for the occasion and the writer of the first three seasons Fanny Herrero praised the fact that the series had “really traveled the world thanks to Netflix, so it’s a great accomplishment ”.
In an interview, Dominique Besnehard saw there the success of “the French touch” in the United States, in the lineage of the French cinema of “François Truffaut or Michel Deville” who successfully showed the 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.
More than twenty adaptations
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. For the author, the success of the series “is the graft of an efficiency, a writing and a fabrication 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 acknowledged that “the broadcast on Netflix of the four seasons has allowed us with a production, we will say local, to be seen in more than 200 territories”. “Today there are practically 20 remakes which have been signed, which are in production or which have been shot”, especially in Canada and India, he detailed, Dominique Besnehard confirming that a season 5 would see the day, first in the form of a feature film.