Call My Agent

Dominique Besnehard's Call My Agent (Dix pour cent) launched on France 2 in October 2015 and ran for four seasons until 2020, becoming one of the most internationally exported French television comedies of the streaming era. Besnehard, the showrunner, had spent thirty years as one of France's most prominent talent agents (BMG); the show's behind-the-scenes accuracy comes directly from that experience.

Behind the scenes at ASK, a Parisian talent agency, agents Andréa Martel (Camille Cottin), Mathias Barneville (Thibault de Montalembert), Gabriel Sarda (Grégory Montel) and Arlette Azémar (Liliane Rovère) scramble to manage the egos, crises, and impossible contractual demands of France's biggest movie stars, Cécile de France, Audrey Fleurot, Juliette Binoche, Isabelle Huppert, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Monica Bellucci, Sigourney Weaver, Jean Dujardin and others, all playing exaggerated versions of themselves. Each episode is structured around one star's professional crisis, while the agency's own internal politics provide the season-long arc.

The show's structural masterstroke (that France's actual major movie stars would agree to play satirised versions of themselves, on the strength of Besnehard's industry relationships) produced a series whose meta-textual register no other national television culture has been able to replicate at the same scale. The show was remade in the UK as Ten Percent (2022) with Helena Bonham Carter and others; the original remains the foundational version. Camille Cottin's central performance launched her into international stardom.