General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Hook Up Plan

The Hook Up Plan (French: Plan Cœur) is a French romantic comedy television series created by Chris Lang, Noémie Saglio, and Julien Teisseire for Netflix, in which the friends of a perpetually single Parisian woman secretly hire a male escort to restore her confidence in love.¹ It ran for three seasons and 20 episodes from December 7, 2018 to January 1, 2022.²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Plan Cœur; international title The Hook Up Plan³
Creators	Chris Lang, Noémie Saglio, Julien Teisseire¹
Run	December 7, 2018 to January 1, 2022; 3 seasons, 20 episodes²
Season sizes	Season 1: 8 episodes; Season 2: 6; Season 3: 6⁴
Lead cast	Zita Hanrot (Elsa), Sabrina Ouazani, Joséphine Draï, Marc Ruchmann¹
Place in Netflix France	Second French Netflix original series, after Marseille⁵
Production	My Box Films; directed by Noémie Saglio and Renaud Bertrand⁶

Spoilers

Premise

Elsa, a Parisian played by Zita Hanrot, has been unable to move on from her ex two years after their breakup. Her best friends secretly hire a male escort, Jules (Marc Ruchmann), whom Elsa believes to be a schoolteacher, to renew her faith in dating. The plan works a little too well, and the deception strains the friendships at the story's center.¹^•⁷ The friends are Charlotte (Sabrina Ouazani), an unattached seductress who orchestrates the scheme, and Émilie (Joséphine Draï), settled and pregnant during the first season.⁸

Format and episodes

The series comprises three seasons of eight, six, and six episodes, with individual episodes running between 22 and 32 minutes, plus a lockdown-era Covid special of 49 minutes.⁵ Season 1 episode titles each begin with "Plan": The Secret Plan, The Sloppy Plan, The Booty Plan, The Love Plan, The Party Plan, The Lame Plan, The Solo Plan, and The Exit Plan.¹ Season 3 follows the fallout after the revelation of the relationship between Charlotte and Maxime, which shatters the group of friends.¹²

Title and origins

The French title is a reversal of the slang expression plan cul, which means a purely sexual hookup; substituting cœur (heart) signals a search for genuine love, wordplay that is entirely lost in the English title.⁵ The creators have said the series was first considered under the working title "Génération Q," and that earlier candidate names included "Can't buy me love" and Plan Cul.⁹

From film script to series. The premise originated with Chris Lang, the British screenwriter and creator of Unforgotten and Innocent, who had written a feature-film screenplay years earlier. Noémie Saglio, previously associated with Connasse, kept only the core idea, two friends paying an escort for a friend struggling to find love, and developed the series with Julien Teisseire, who had worked on Profilage. Lang did not collaborate on the writing afterward. Saglio said his script felt very "1990s," with career-obsessed, glamorous characters, and that she wanted instead to write about people in their thirties.¹⁰^•⁸ She described the intended blend as a classical romantic comedy mixed with a generational friends comedy, and cited British and American rom-coms such as Notting Hill, Love Actually, and Crazy Stupid Love as influences.⁹

Release and reception

Season 1 premiered on Netflix on December 7, 2018, eight days after Télérama's review appeared.²^•⁸ The announcement of the series, as Netflix's second French original after the critically poorly received Marseille, was initially met with widespread skepticism by critics, whose subsequent highly positive reviews of the first season inevitably referenced the low bar Marseille had set. With its rom-com conventions and multicultural cast of Parisian millennials, the series differed from Marseille in almost every respect and became a local and international hit.¹¹ Season 2 arrived in October 2019, less than a year after the first season; Saglio said she and Teisseire had three to four months to write it and reported having considerable creative freedom with Netflix.¹⁰ Season 3, the final season, was released on January 1, 2022.²

Cast

Zita Hanrot, who won the César for most promising female actress in 2016 for Fatima, plays Elsa; Marc Ruchmann plays Jules.⁸ The supporting cast includes Sabrina Ouazani, Joséphine Draï, Syrus Shahidi, Yvan Naubron, Guillaume Labbé, and Tom Dingler.¹

Context in French streaming

The series was received as a test case for Netflix in France. Reviewer Charles Martin called it "much more authentic" than Marseille, while noting Amazon Prime Video's failed French entry, the Franco-German comedy Deutsch-les-Landes (2018). The two visible misfires had fed an impression that global streamers could not achieve a quality innate to local creators; Plan Cœur's success, and Netflix's opening of a Paris office in 2020, worked against that notion.¹¹ The show has also been used in French-language teaching, with studies selecting its roughly 25-minute episodes for adolescent second-language learners.¹³

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Scripted television and comedy series › Sitcom and comedy series › Comedy series outside the US and UK › Premiered 1964 to 2021

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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