Call my agent – Italy is the new Italian TV series that takes up the successful French concept Dix Pour Cent and is broadcast on Sky with two episodes every week
ORIGINAL TITLE: Call my Agent. GENRE: Comedy, drama. NATION: Italia. CREATOR: Lisa Nur Sultan. REGIA:Luca Ribuoli. CAST: Sara Drago, Maurizio Lastrico, Michele Di Mauro, Marzia Ubaldi. DURATION: 6 episodes. DISTRIBUTOR: Sky. EXIT: 20/01/2023.
Call my agent – Italy arrives on Sky as a pleasant novelty in the Italian serial panorama, which takes up a French TV series Dix pour cent produced by Netflix, which has enjoyed great success not only in France thanks to its perfect packaging, to say the least.
Therefore, the idea of the Italian production companies involved Sky Studios and Palomar of wanting to resume a series of this type and to do it in the first two episodes which were also broadcast in a fairly faithful way to the original script is excellent.
Review Call my agent – The plot
The series is based on the life of four agents and their assistants within an Italian entertainment agency that follows the contracts of actors, singers and show business personalities. These agents live mainly on work, they follow their clients at work and in some aspects of their private life, with passion, abundance, enormous patience, forgetting to take time for themselves. We find Lea, guided by her passion for cinema and her impulsiveness, Vittorio cynical and skilled at bargaining, Gabriele, messy, messy, but with a big heart, Elvira, an experienced old-school “businesswoman”.
An interesting aspect of this series is that all the characters from the world of cinema that appear in the episodes are really famous characters who play themselves, with great self-irony and talent. In the Italian series we can see Paola Cortellesi and Paolo Sorrentino in the first two episodes and then to follow Corrado Guzzanti, Stefano Accorsi, Pierfrancesco Favino and Anna Ferzetti, Matilda De Angelis and many other short cameos of well-known characters.
Sky Cinema broadcast the first two episodes of the first season made up of six in total starting from 20 January 2023. The first impression is certainly that we are faced with a series that mixes comedy and a pinch of drama, built in a well structured that stands out in front of the other Italian products that we are used to seeing. However, this does not mean that the series is totally successful and above all that it is not without flaws.
Review Call my agent: a series that focuses on the comic
Although we are facing the Italian product, the comparison with the original French series is inevitable, above all because some parts, such as dialogues and characters, are filmed in the smallest detail, including development times and shots. And in this comparison, the Italian TV series emerges as an unfortunately not exactly successful attempt to be an unassailable and also revolutionary quality product.
The most pleasant aspect of the final packaging is certainly the comic charge that both the protagonists and their famous clients have, such as a very brilliant Paolo Sorrentino and an extremely self-deprecating Paola Cortellesi. However, this comic charge often gives way to the grotesque, emphasizing the strengths and weaknesses of the protagonist agents and making them look like workaholics on the verge of a nervous breakdown. When instead the four agents are much more complex, emotional and fragile than it appears and above all they are moved by an exaggerated passion for cinemawhich in the first two episodes can only be glimpsed from afar.
What gets lost along the way is the drama side of the serieswhich in Dix pour cent is present enough to make the episodes exciting thanks to their rapid transition from comic to dramatic, which is also useful for giving greater three-dimensionality to the protagonists.
Call my agent review: the smudges that make it a wasted opportunity
Taken by itself, the choice of the grotesque can be very successful, as in the case of Boris or even Tutti pazzi per amore, to name two successful Italian TV series, but in this case it is not supported by the rhythm in the direction. There are some comedic passages that are slow, loose and confusing, almost as if the space in the camera is very large and the actors can’t fill it. At the same time, even the amalgam between the moments within the agency and the few moments of private life do not follow each other in a fluid way, but seem to be inserted successively with little screenplay support.
Conclusions
See Call my agent – Italy separating from the French original, in the final judgment it is not simple, because unfortunately it does not hold the comparison if it weren’t for the illustrious names of the famous people involved. Taking it separately, one can still appreciate this Italian TV series as enjoyable and original in its narrative structure. Overall it is a product packaged to make people laugh intelligently and bring it into a context that had never been shown on the small screen. A product that does not make the revolutionbut on the other hand in the Italian serial world it has never been done, so it is not fair to give Call my agent – Italy all this responsibility.
A fun product, but one that doesn’t make a revolution
Plus points
- The Italian stars involved
- The comedy of some passages
Points against
- The slow pace of directing
- The script is not always smooth
- The excess of the grotesque
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