‘Call My Agent!’ Showrunner Fanny Herrero Talks Secrets Behind French Comedy’s Success – Series Mania

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Fanny Herrero, the showrunner of hit French comedy-drama Call My Agent!, discussed the genesis of the show’s success during a panel at the Series Mania festival today.Herrero detailed how the series, which is returning for a fifth season and a movie as well as spawning several remakes in other languages, started life in development hell.Agent-turned producer Dominique Besnehard first began mounting the series at Canal Plus, but it didn’t progress after a few years because “it was too complicated,” according to Herrero.“It was almost dead,” she added.Herrero was enlisted when the show was re-developed for a public TV channel, and eventually took over as the main writer after the original team ran into further challenges. “The main difficulty was to find a way to get this small-world subject [being an agent] to be universal and not too cynical… they were worried it would not be broad enough to interest people,” she explained.“I wrote a good episode, I think, they told me I had found the right tone.

I became the writing head, I asked them to leave me alone and think about it for four months. I worked a lot on the phycology, the links between the characters, the relationships,” the writer explained.Key to unlocking the project’s potential was finding the balance between drama and comedy, making sure the seriousness was established before working out the jokes, Herrero outlined.“We were always thinking about them [the characters] as real people, serious people with serious lives, as deep as possible,” she commented. “It’s not silly things, I hate when you watch fiction and it feels like the characters are Playmobil.