Imported goods

Have you heard the news? British TV writers are having their brains wired so that the moment they get a new idea for a show, a bell goes off in the studios at Burbank, Calif.

The cable series Episodes milks the humour in the misguided attempts to refashion successful British shows for American audiences.

OK, maybe that isn’t happening, but from the looks of it, a lot of North American producers might welcome such an innovation. Just this Monday, MTV, The Movie Network and Movie Central premiered Skins, a U.S.-Canada version of a teen-drama series that has been running in the U.K. since 2007. The week before, Showtime unveiled Shameless, an American remake of the six-year-old British show of the same title.

Last week also saw Showtime and BBC2 debut a joint effort called Episodes, a half-hour comedy series about a British writing couple hired to re-create their BAFTA-winning TV series for a U.S. network. At last, someone had the inspiration to mine this cultural appropriation for laughs.

Episodes milks the humour in the misguided attempts to refashion successful British shows for American audiences. Writers Sean and Beverly Lincoln (Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig) arrive in L.A. keen to do an American remake of their series Lyman’s Boys, a comedy about the witty headmaster of a boys’ private school. They’ve even convinced its distinguished British star, Julian Bullard (Richard Griffiths of The History Boys), to repeat his role. But it turns out the crass network boss (John Pankow) has other ideas.

Deciding that Griffiths’s character is "too English" and unlikable, he enlists ex-Friends star Matt LeBlanc (LeBlanc himself, doing a wicked self-parody). Before they know it, Sean and Beverly have agreed to turn Lyman’s Boys into Pucks!, in which LeBlanc plays a macho kids’ hockey coach.

Plenty of shows, of British provenance or otherwise, have suffered at the hands of such boneheaded network interference. But the reasons that remade U.K. hits fail – or succeed – in North America are often more complicated. Even when an American show slavishly imitates its British model, as was the case with NBC’s wretched Coupling (2003), it can be a thudding flop. But as NBC learned shortly afterwards with The Office, adjusting a British template to suit American sensibilities can translate into a long-running hit.

Ricky Gervais’s original series, a faux documentary set in the offices of a paper-supply company run by a slimy, double-talking manager (Gervais) with no people skills, was cruel, uncomfortable and unsentimental. Its comedy was rooted in the cringing familiarity of its workplace characters and situations. The U.S. take, starring that harmless clown Steve Carell, is at once more cartoonish and more warm-blooded. Although fans of the original find it comparatively toothless, the American Office employs old-school sitcom principles that have stood the test of time. The lead character, no matter how outrageous, is essentially likable. And the other characters, no matter how outlandish the situation, are always predictable.

Judging from its pilot, Shameless aims to push the limits of likeability. William H. Macy stars as Frank Gallagher, father to a brood of unruly kids packed into a rickety house in a working-class Chicago neighbourhood. Frank is an unemployed alcoholic who spends his days in the bar and his nights passed out in his own urine on the kitchen floor. Yet Macy and the show end up fudging things. They treat this tragic figure affectionately, as a twinkling Irish-American sot who’s as flush with paternal pride as he is with boilermakers. Under its layer of sedulously applied grit, the U.S. version of Shameless feels no edgier than Party of Five.

The British don’t care if a main character is likable. In Jimmy McGovern’s great 1990s crime drama Cracker, Robbie Coltrane’s arrogant, addiction-riddled psychologist held centre stage by sheer force of his charisma, even if he was often a right arsehole. When ABC’s spinoff, starring Robert Pastorelli, was launched on U.S. airwaves in 1997, it sank like a stone. The popularity of more recent series like House and Curb Your Enthusiasm, however, suggest that American audiences are coming around to abrasive antiheroes, at least in a humorous context.

If U.S. producers keep looking to the U.K., there’s good reason: many of their biggest hits began across the pond. Leaving aside easily translatable reality and game-show franchises like American Idol or Who Wants to be a Millionaire, there’s a history of lifting sitcom premises from the Brits — shows like Three’s Company, Too Close for Comfort and Cosby, for example, took their inspiration from Man About the House, Keep It in the Family and One Foot in the Grave, respectively.

Norman Lear is the guy who started the trend. Back in the late 1960s, he snapped up the rights to Till Death Us Do Part, Johnny Speight’s landmark BBC sitcom about a foul-mouthed, working-class reactionary at odds with his socialist son-in-law. Lear’s rewrite, All in the Family, which first aired in 1971, was a sensation, partly because it dared to discuss race, sex and politics in the era of The Brady Bunch, but also because Lear put himself into the show, cannily reshaping Speight’s Alf Garnett into Archie Bunker, a blue-collar bigot based on the writer’s own father. Lear worked similar ratings magic a year later with Sanford and Son, an African-American retailoring of the BBC’s Steptoe and Son, set in L.A.’s Watts area and starring black comic Redd Foxx.

In Lear’s day, before the advent of cable, North American audiences saw few British shows and were largely ignorant of his sources. Today, with hundreds of channels, satellite dishes and BBC America, viewers can more easily compare the copycat to the original.

Since the ’70s, too, Marshall McLuhan’s "global village" has increasingly become a reality. British television, like British culture, is no longer so foreign to North American viewers. But the idea that British shows need to be repurposed for audiences on this continent feels a bit condescending. Surely, a show worth emulating has the universal appeal to stand on its own outside the U.K. The Brits know this – they seldom remake American comic and dramatic series, and just import them as is. (They even watch the imitations of their own creations: The Office: An American Workplace, with Carell & Co., airs there on ITV.)

With so much excellent homegrown television in the U.S., from 30 Rock to Mad Men, stateside versions of Shameless and Skins seem pointless. Episodes, on the other hand, points in the right direction. Even as it makes fun of the British/American cultural divide, the show itself is a co-production meshing U.S. and U.K. talents. We could do with more of this co-operative creation.

And we could do with less of the snooty Hollywood attitude satirized in Episodes. In L.A., LeBlanc and others tell Sean and Beverly that they’ve seen every episode of Lyman’s Boys and loved it. So why, we wonder, does it have to be turned into a coarse locker-room comedy? Because, they’d be quick to tell you, the American public is too dumb to appreciate sophisticated British humour. But hey, if Joey from Friends gets it, why can’t John Q. Viewer?

Episodes, Shameless and Skins all air in Canada on Movie Central and The Movie Network.

Martin Morrow is a writer based in Toronto.