Call My Remake: U.K. Adaptation of French Hit is ‘All Inspired By True Events’
variety.comK.J. Yossman French comedy “Call My Agent!” was a domestic hit after it launched on France’s TF1 network in 2015 but it wasn’t until later, when it got picked up by Netflix, that the series about a fictional Parisian talent agency found a global audience.Christian Baute, whose company Headline Pictures has produced a U.K.
version of the series alongside Bron Studios (“Joker”) for Amazon and Sundance Now, spotted the show’s potential during its original broadcast. “I thought, this is brilliant,” he recalls.Partnering with David Davoli, Bron’s president of television, Baute reached out to the producers of “Call My Agent” as well as TF1, which owns the format, in a bid to snap up the English language rights. “It was a bit of a niche format in terms of its popularity when we secured it,” Davoli acknowledges. “It wasn’t until we had greenlit our show and we were casting [that] it was almost like a perfect storm.
Because that’s when we took it out into the U.S. market [and] all of a sudden, everybody’s going, ‘You have the rights to that format?’”The next challenge was figuring out how to create an English-language version, which they did by bringing on board writer and showrunner John Morton, who is best known as the creator of popular BBC mockumentary “W1A.” “Christian and I sat down with [Morton] and he said, ‘I’ll only do this if I can find a way to do it so that it’s as good as or better than the original.
Because otherwise, what’s the point?’” recalls Davoli.“We knew we needed to keep the essence of what made the original so beloved but we also knew that we had to do something different in order to create our own audience,” the Bron Studios exec continues. “Otherwise, we felt that there was a risk that we would just be.
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