A Look at ‘Ten Percent,’ a British ‘Call My Agent!’ Remake

LONDON — About five minutes into the first episode of “Ten Percent,” the British remake of the hit French show “Call My Agent!,” the partners and their assistants at the fictional talent agency Nightingale Hart are debating how to tell a famous actor that she has been deemed too old for a movie role.

“I can’t lie to her, obviously,” Dan (Prasanna Puwanarajah) says. “No, no, no,” the other agents chime in. “But obviously I can’t tell her the truth,” he continues, prompting another horrified chorus of “nooo.”

“That’s the narrow edge along which agents must inch every day of their lives,” said John Morton, an executive producer and scriptwriter who developed the series, which premieres on Amazon’s Prime Video on April 28 in Britain and on Sundance Now and AMC+ on April 29 in the United States. “The relationship with the truth is a fascinating juggling act in this world,” he said. “It’s a problem not much understood outside the industry — and not even by clients inside it — and a really interesting area to have fun with.”

The connections, dependencies and emotional ties between four agents and their clients are at the comic heart of “Ten Percent,” just as they were at the fictional Parisian agency in “Call My Agent!” (“Dix Pour Cent” in French).

That series was a hit in France after its 2015 debut there, but it received little international attention until the coronavirus pandemic hit, when the show became a word-of-mouth phenomenon. (Turkish and Indian versions have been released, and South Korea, Italy, Malaysia and Poland all have adaptations in development.)

When Morton — the award-winning writer and director of the British shows “Twenty Twelve” and “W1A” — had his first meeting about “Ten Percent” in 2019, the French series was still “a cult hit with a number of very loyal followers,” he said. “I was a huge fan, and my first thought was, ‘the bar is already so high, how do you not mess this up?’ Then the bar got higher.”

Morton has retained much of the structural framework of “Call My Agent!,” with four central characters who are at least superficially similar to their French counterparts. There is the tough career woman Rebecca (Lydia Leonard); the slightly bumbling, likable Dan; the old-guard patrician Stella (Maggie Steed); and the controlling, self-deceiving Jonathan (Jack Davenport), who in this rendition is the son of Richard Nightingale (Jim Broadbent), a founder of the agency.

There is also Misha (Hiftu Quasem), the daughter Jonathan is keeping a secret, who bags a job as Rebecca’s assistant early in the first episode. And the catnip factor of the original series remains: a plethora of big-name actors (Kelly MacDonald, Helena Bonham Carter, Dominic West, Phoebe Dynevor, David and Jessica Oyelowo among them) playing themselves in story lines that touch on ageism, stage fright, pay parity and the cost (for actresses) of having children.

So far, so familiar. But after a first episode that closely follows the opening of the French series, the show’s plotlines gradually begin to differ, and to cater more closely to the specific preoccupations of the British cultural industry, with its greater ties to — and anxieties about — American partnerships and influences.

Unlike the British cultural industry, and partly because of the language factor, Morton said: “the French entertainment and creative world does not feel secondary or beholden to Hollywood, and in fact celebrates that it isn’t. But if you are British and in this industry, whatever you think about it, you feel that the mother ship, the big factories, are over there. To fold that into the show felt true.”

After Richard’s unexpected death, Jonathan sells a majority share to a large American agency, which promptly sends an executive, Kirsten (Chelsey Crisp), to London to oversee Nightingale Hart. “She might be nice,” Dan says hopefully. “I’ve met some perfectly normal Americans.”

There is plenty of humor to be had through the clash of cultures, a perfect vehicle for Morton’s trademark brand of dry humor, as the British team mutter “yes,” “no” or “right,” while the Americans tell them repeatedly how excited they are about the new relationship.

The very British style of understatement and indirection that pervades the dialogue is a notable tonal difference from the French series. This is taken to a masterly height in the character of Julia (Rebecca Humphries), Jonathan’s assistant, who rarely utters more than “yes” or “no” but manages to infuse the words with a repressed intensity that conveys her obsession with her boss.

“The French do everything stylishly and passionately and articulately,” Davenport said. “And our characters have to be hyper-articulate, professionally. But personally, they are as inarticulate as the average Brit. We are not a culture which is encouraged to say what we think or feel.”

Morton’s writing, said Puwanarajah, reveals how fast the characters’s “legs are paddling under the surface under ‘yes, yes, I mean, maybe, carry on.’ It’s funny and real and dissonant in a Chekhovian way. We all adored the French series, but weirdly it never came on set with us because every scene was a John Morton scene.”

Like the French series, the show uses its guest stars to evoke the realities and vulnerabilities of those who seem most successful. When MacDonald’s real-life agent called to tell the actress about her character being informed that she was too old for a role, the agent “was struggling a bit to find the right words,” MacDonald said. “I realized that it was a bit awkward for her to say that, just like in the show, which was quite funny.”

In an episode featuring the married actors Jessica and David Oyelowo, the relevant issue of pay parity and its accompanying complexities are evoked: “Your market rate is higher,” Jonathan tells David; but “Jess has given me her life!” David replies — a line he suggested, he said in a joint video interview with his wife.

“It made me cry when I read the script,” Jessica said. “Because if you are an actress and you have babies, you feel that career loss. It was lovely that they added those personal tweaks.”

Playing yourself isn’t easy, David said humorously. “I tried to think of myself as a character, but every time someone said ‘David and Jess’ on set, my brain short-circuited. There was a moment when the director asked me to play ‘him’ as more pathetic, and I was like, is David Oyelowo pathetic, or is the character pathetic?” When Jessica said she found it easier to separate the real and onscreen self, her husband nodded. “She was never asked to be pathetic,” he said.

The show gives time to these issues in the cultural workplace, but Morton said this wasn’t his primary intention. “The French did something which I admire them for, something kinder and more nuanced, which I hope we captured,” he said. “There is a kind of dysfunctional family here, who we care about.”

As Simon (Tim McInnerny), an aging, alcoholic actor, puts it to a politely smiling Bonham Carter: “However tragic one’s own life might seem, in the end it does become funny.”