This Sunday, at the Royal Festival Hall, the television BAFTAs yielded one big surprise result. The gong for Best International Series went, not to any of the heavy hitters such as Succession, The Bear or The Last of Us, but to a little-known French show called Class Act. It was such a shock win that the lead actor, Laurent Lafitte, accepting the award, said with a self-effacing chuckle, "You should watch our show. It’s very good."
I agree with Lafitte. Class Act, or ‘Tapie’ to give it its French title, is very good. It is an astounding feat of television – a punchy biopic condensing decades into seven episodes, charting the rise and fall of a man sometimes referred to as the French Donald Trump: Bernard Tapie. It has everything: love, sex, drugs, danger, bribery, football, politics. It has powerhouse central performances and a clever, unpredictable plot. If people were taken aback by its win, I was not, having gobbled up the show on Netflix last year.
View full post on YoutubeIt is just one example of what appears to be a French golden age of TV, happening largely, and perhaps because of, the advent of streaming services like Netflix, which is substantially expanding its reach. It was maybe catalysed by Netflix's procurement of the France 2 show Dix Per Cent, renamed Call My Agent! in 2015, which went on to be an international hit (winning an Emmy in 2021). It made a global star of Camille Cottin and was so popular it spawned an English-language reboot.
If you haven’t already succumbed to the charms of Call My Agent!, it is a great place to start. A witty, sharp show about a talent agency in Paris, with fantastic celebrity cameos and an immersion into the French capital that is nothing like Emily’s. It is also distinctly French in its approach; its frequent absurdities, wry humour, surprising heart. It is this characteristic combination that may draw many into the delights of French TV which, much like its much-vaunted cinematic industry, has a flavour all its own.
French TV walks its own walk, and it can therefore be a refreshing change of pace in your bingeing schedule. Something like A Very Secret Service (Au Service de La France) – an irreverent comedy about the French secret service in the 1960s – is a great example of this; or there is the success of Igor Grotesman, an actor-turned-director whose Netflix show, Family Business, has been a huge hit, and was one of my favourite watches of the year. I was late to the party, and therefore watched all three seasons of the show, which began in 2019, in one delicious serving. It tells the story of a Jewish family in Le Marais who run a failing butcher shop and find themselves accidentally falling, instead, into the drug trade.
The premise is as absurd as the execution, which veers into surrealism and the grotesque, while retaining some serious emotional heft. It has fantastic intergenerational casting, including Call My Agent’s nonagenarian star Liliane Rovère and the acclaimed French Moroccan actor Gérard Darmon, and better reflects Paris’s more multicultural make-up. It also produced one of my favourite small-screen characters to date, the impulsive, often deranged, Clémentine, played by the wonderful Louise Coldefy.
It was a nice warm-up for Grotesman’s new show Fiasco, a mockumentary about a catastrophic film shoot, which dropped on Netflix at the end of April and has a stellar cast including major French film stars Vincent Cassel, François Civil and Pierre Niney. Like its predecessor, it is strange and compelling with refreshing comedic chops.
There are tentpole productions to be found too, like the big-budget Lupin, starring Omar Sy, which takes the traditional French novels about the master thief of the Belle Epoque, Arsene Lupin, and gives him a modern-day, contemporary spin in this addictive thriller. The high-octane production has been a massive success for Netflix. Its fourth season will debut later this year.
Fans of reality TV shows will also be appeased with L’Agence; a real-estate show that is three seasons in, and is like Selling Sunset with none of the drama, far fewer questionable outfits, and more exclusive, envy-inducing French and international properties than you can shake a baguette at.
Amazon Prime commissioned a raft of French shows back in 2022, including Jean Dujardin’s smart and funny Alphonse, which co-stars Charlotte Gainsbourg, and the crime saga Ourika, which dropped on the streamer in March, and is set in the aftermath of the 2005 Paris riots. Disney+ is in on the action too, streaming the popular romantic-comedy with a mental-health message, Irrésistible, and the warm family comedy-drama Everything is Fine.
Streamers have given us more than a little decision fatigue when it comes to our small-screen habits, yet the rise of French TV on these platforms shows that there is a hunger for even more choice, and potentially a different feel altogether. These shows are frequently transportive and serve up a unique humour as well as a fresh roster of talent. I myself have found myself almost wholly watching French shows over the last few months, hopelessly addicted to their fresh perspective and often off-beat charm. It seems we are all starting to tune in to La France now. If Class Act’s shock BAFTA win is anything to go by, it looks like the French TV revolution has begun.
