The Remake - why???

When I lived in England we were just entering the satellite channel boom and you could count the terrestrial channels on the fingers of one hand.  Our TV diet consisted of a couple of reality shows – the very first Big Brother was appointment TV – it’s been flogged to death since and was recently taken out and shot after 10 years.  Sitcoms, some serious science programming by men in radiation shield glasses and comb-overs on BBC 2, period dramas and sprinkled into the mix those glossy shows from the US. 

We didn’t mess with perfection, the channels bought shows from abroad and we watched them. The few times we did try and remake shows they were misfires. The woeful Days Like These, the UK version of That Seventies Show sank without a trace, despite being copied word for word – the humour didn’t travel well.  Among others that didn’t work Green Wing the UK version of Scrubs.  We bought plenty of concepts, This is Your Life, Family Fortunes, The Apprentice, Blockbusters (my favourite quiz show) and most recently Deal or No Deal.  Concepts are fair game, you can’t import the host and the slick production values, so you have enough latitude to tailor the program to the audience who are going to watch it.  I prefer the family atmosphere of the UK DOND to the slick sanitized, bimboed up US version.

But going the other way it seems the US TV industry continues to not get British TV shows.  While there are occasional bright spots, the US version of the The Office is actually funny (I hated the UK version).  I think the point I’m trying to make is that we Brits like to watch foreign TV shows because it shows us a world we’d have to hop on a plane to see - from our living rooms.  Brit shows are usually gritty, their humour is blacker their characters darker.  To remake shows like Life on Mars or Being Human or Red Dwarf, Viva Blackpool (Viva Loughlin – one episode CBS), Coupling, Men Behaving Badly and whatever the next remake is that’s coming down the pipe is an insult to the showrunners, actors and most of all to the viewers who ‘won’t get it.’

The reason for this post is that SyFy are remaking Being Human, it’s a huge hit in the UK and did well when it was shown over here on BBC America.  The teaser trailer they had for it went something like this, ‘a vampire, a ghost and a werewolf share a flat in Bristol’ of course Bristol will be swopped for New York or LA and the actors will all be so pretty (in the UK version the werewolf wore glasses, the ghost was obsessive about making tea and the vamp was on the wagon but they blended the horror with the sad/funny bits) and of course just to spice things up a bit the vampire will have a human girlfriend.

US TV has some great shows, but it would be ground-breaking if they could show imported programming in its original form.