Ten Percent review: High-profile cameos make this gentle Call My Agent remake worthwhile

As the adult child of divorced parents, I know that there are very few things that can bring the estranged threads of my family together. But one of them, it has emerged over the last year thanks to Netflix’s lockdown hit, is the French satire Call My Agent! And the entirety of my extant antecedents were not alone in falling for this show about a bumbling actors’ agency. The whole world seemed, miraculously, to embrace subtitles and obscure references to Paris’ cultural milieu. So, naturally, it was only a matter of months before an English-language adaptation was rushed to our screens.

Ten Percent (Amazon has opted for a literal translation of the French title, Dix pour cent) follows the agents of Nightingale Gray, a London-based talent agency led – briefly, I’m afraid – by Jim Broadbent’s avuncular Richard Nightingale. Around him rotate a coterie of subordinates: his cynical son Jonathan (Pirates of the Caribbean’s Jack Davenport), ruthless Rebecca (Gentleman Jack’s Lydia Leonard), dopey Dan (Line of Duty’s Prasanna Puwanarajah), millennial Ollie (Twitter’s Harry Trevaldwyn) and others.

What ensues is a cat-and-mouse game between the agents and their clients (played, predominantly, by actors appearing as themselves). “I can’t lie to her obviously…” Dan announces to his fellow agents after Kelly Macdonald loses a big gig for being too old. “No…” they chorus, in reply. “But obviously I can’t tell her the truth…” he continues, to which, with a certain pantomime quality, the meeting room responds: “No!”

That interaction broadly sums up the central joke of Ten Percent. Despite their position as “clients”, the actors have all the power. The agents, therefore, tread with buffoonish, and often disastrous, delicacy. It is the same sort of light, bureaucratic farce that typified W1A and Twenty Twelve (perhaps unsurprising, given that the writer of both those projects, John Morton, is on the Ten Percent team), designed to elicit knowing chuckles rather than belly laughs. After an opening sequence involving a bike crashing into a step ladder, the show steers clear of physical comedy, and, all too frequently, any other kind of comedy. The arrival of Hiftu Quasem’s Misha, a fish-out-of-water intern who seems to hold some mysterious power over Jonathan, does little to dilute this earnestness. “I’m guessing you don’t take sugar,” she, at one point, asks Kelly Macdonald while making her a cup of tea. The episodes, at almost an hour long, have plenty of fat that could do with cutting.

The other signature appeal of Call My Agent! was its cameos from top French talent, such as Juliette Binoche and Jean Dujardin. There is little to lampoon about Kelly Macdonald (“I’m mostly comfortable with who I am,” she tells Jonathan, when the subject of cosmetic surgery comes up) and even Helena Bonham Carter tones down the kookiness to play herself. It’s not until Dominic West appears, struggling his way through a selfie-obsessed version of Hamlet, that the cameos hit the broadness required to make them worthwhile. That moment also marks the point at which the series begins, tentatively, to diverge from its Gallic cousin, after an opening couplet of episodes that mirror Call My Agent! with almost fawning closeness. But even if Olivia Williams appearing as a very polite, likeable version of herself doesn’t excite you, Ten Percent achieves a gently bittersweet tone that ensures that, even if it’s not funny, it’s still eminently watchable.

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Whether it holds a candle to the French original is a judgement I’ll leave to the members of my extended family. Ten Percent has neither riotous slapstick nor biting satire. It just rambles along benignly, like the radio at a hairdresser. But, in spite of all those weaknesses, there is a seductive quality to it. Like a comforting bowl of French onion soup, it is largely absent of texture or complexity, but will fill you up all the same.