Fanny Herrero is used to working with stars. Her hit television series Call My Agent! centres around the Paris talent agency ASK, whose client roster includes Isabelle Adjani, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Monica Bellucci and Jean Reno — all of whom have appeared as themselves. But after developing the show (French title: Dix pour cent) and leading its writing team for the first three seasons, Herrero yearned for something different.
“No one pushed me out and it was not an easy decision,” says the 48-year-old on a video call from Paris. “I loved the show, I loved the actors. It was seven wonderful years of my life. But I had to do something else because I was a little tired of the stories and plots.” While her former colleagues went on to produce a fourth season (a fifth is planned, as is a TV film), Herrero began developing Standing Up, a new show about Paris’s stand-up comedy scene that comes to Netflix this week.
At first she considered taking a leaf out of the Call My Agent! manual and populating her new series with well-known French comics. “But it didn’t last long because this new series is so much about authenticity,” she says. “It was really important for me to have unknown actors who we could immediately believe were the characters.”
The idea came about when Herrero went for dinner with the popular stand-up Gad Elmaleh, who told her that a new Paris comedy scene was fast developing. To prove his point, Elmaleh invited Herrero along to Le Paname, where some of the hottest new talents perform. “It’s almost only young people between 20 and 35 doing stand-up in France,” Herrero says. “And I really felt these kids had something to say to us.”
While French stand-up is well established, recent years have seen a boom, with many new venues popping up. Herrero reckons that four comedy clubs have opened in Paris in the past two years. The Drôle club depicted in Standing Up is loosely inspired by Le Paname, sharing a similar location in the 11th arrondissement, where immigrant families have often settled. Swept up by the new scene, Herrero felt compelled to write about it. “I didn’t want to be on the red carpet any more, but in the basement of comedy clubs — these small, dark places that are a little smelly,” she says.
Standing Up follows several recent US shows such as The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, Crashing and I’m Dying Up Here, all of which have mined the drama surrounding the creation of live comedy. It follows Aïssatou (Mariama Gueye), Bling (Jean Siuen), Nezir (Younès Boucif) and Apolline (Elsa Guedj), four young stand-ups honing their acts and trying to stay funny and relevant. “Each one of them has a different way of living and a different culture,” Herrero says. “But they all have the same vocation of wanting to be a comedian.”
The humour is edgier than in Call My Agent! because Herrero wanted it to reflect the hot-button topics of integration and immigration that have been used by the far right to make political inroads. “It’s about my feeling of what is happening in France right now, where the debate on identity is a little stinky,” she says. “I don’t like it and this is my way of answering that. I wanted to show these kids being the sons or grandsons of immigrants and that they have their part in the national story and cultural expression.”
Herrero herself is the great-granddaughter of Spanish immigrants who moved to southern France in the 1900s. Her father is the former Toulon rugby player and coach Daniel Herrero, famed for his philosophical musings and a white mop of hair always tied with a red bandanna. “All through my childhood I heard my dad talk about collective intelligence and what makes a team be a team,” she says. “Maybe that’s why I work as a showrunner, because I think series are such a collective way of working.”
The status of “showrunner”, a US term describing the lead creative force on a TV series, was one that Herrero has had to fight hard for in France, where the director has long been considered omnipotent. “When Call My Agent! started seven years ago, almost no one here was a showrunner — and especially not a writer.” she says. “I was one of the first to ask for that position and to stand up for it in the media.”
This has resulted in a raising of the profile of scriptwriters in France, where the cult of the auteur director has long held sway. “We still have to translate this new recognition to contracts and financial interest,” Herrero says, “but at least the culture is now changing for the better.”
On the large mirror behind her are numerous Post-it labels, with notes describing the scenes for the first three episodes of the second season of Standing Up, colour-coded for each of the main characters. “We brainstorm, and then when we think the storyline is good, we start posting up on the wall,” Herrero says. “You can see better with all the colours if it is well balanced and where the main points are. It’s a good way to visualise the rhythm of the episode.”
One of the most compelling storylines in the show involves Aïssatou trying out some risqué material about the pleasure her boyfriend gets from a prostate massage. At the same time that this is making her a viral sensation, it impacts on her relationship with him and her family. “She dares to say things that others don’t,” Herrero observes. “It wouldn’t have been interesting if she had said ordinary stuff about sexuality. Instead she talks about something that men can be touchy about.”
Standing Up derives a lot of its pathos from the way the characters draw on their personal lives to build their acts and how that in turn affects how they are perceived by those around them. “Of course, as a writer I know all about that,” says Herrero. “Life and art are so connected. What I found interesting is that the stand-ups are able to reveal things about themselves in their acts that they wouldn’t in their everyday lives.”
This is Herrero’s first show for Netflix (Call My Agent! was made for the public TV station France 2), an experience that she found empowering. “When they said they wanted to produce my next show, they were very positive about me being the showrunner,” she says. “The streaming platforms are all looking for very specific shows, but ones which can speak to anyone. That’s maybe what I’m doing not too badly, making stuff that is specific but also universal.”
On Netflix from March 18
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Call My Agent! showrunner Fanny Herrero: ‘I didn’t want to be on the red carpet any more’
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