Thursday Thirteen #69

Recently, BBC America came up with a slogan describing itself as “the birthplace of American TV” or something similar.  Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration of course, but they base their claim on the fact that there are currently four shows on prime time US TV that were originally from Britain, and that BBC America has shown them all.  Anyway, it got me thinking and before I knew it I had a subject for a TT.  So, abandoning my projected Thirteen Cakes I Like,  I now give you…

               13 American TV Shows Based On British Originals
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Three’s Company   This was based on a very successful British sitcom of the early and mid seventies called Man About The House.  At first it followed the original very closely.  A man wants to share an apartment with two unmarried women he has never met before and because they are afraid that the landlord who lives downstairs will not permit it, they pretend that he (the young man, not the landlord) is gay.  The US show clung to this gag almost all the way through the run, though in the British version it was allowed to wither away. 

In both versions, the landlords were Mrs and Mrs Roper (George and Mildred in Britain, Stanley and Helen in America). In both versions, Mr Roper tried to avoid sex with Mrs Roper, who made frequent sarcastic innuendos about it.  In both versions, there was a single man living upstairs called Larry. The show was about the loves and lives of three young twenty-somethings and their dealings with the Ropers downstairs. 

The US version, though, because of the demands of network TV, censorship, broadcast standards, family values etc, was a very sanitised version of the British one.  The young American man, played by the personable and very much missed John Ritter, was always trying to get various women into bed but he never succeeded.  His plans to get the flat to himself always backfired, or something else happened to thwart him.  It seemed that every episode ended with the three main characters enjoying a (very chaste) group hug.  The two young women in the apartment were as safe as if they had been living in a convent! 

The young British man (played by Richard O’Sullivan) did get his end away a number of times even though we never saw it, but we heard about it. Once or twice a strange woman would emerge with him from his bedroom to share breakfast, much to the disapproval of the two women who pretended they weren’t jealous.

The US version lasted much longer than the British one, which seems to be customary.  There were many cast changes, though John Ritter stayed to the end as did Joyce DeWitt.   Suzanne Somers, who played the dumb (but supposedly adorable) blonde Chrissy and made her name with the show, was written out after she and her agent/husband demanded far too much money (she wanted a raise from $30,000 per episode to $150,000).  She thought she was bigger than the show and refused to show up for tapings when her demand for a pay raise was turned down.  She was wrong.  It lasted for many years without her.

Both versions spawned spin offs starring the Ropers (George And Mildred  in Britain, and The Ropers in America).   

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Life On Mars  was a very successful drama that ran for two series in Britain about a year ago.  Quite a new idea actually.  A detective is hit by a car and wakes up in 1973.  Same man, same job, but it’s 35 years ago.  We don’t know if he’s hallucinating, in a coma, or really back there.  So while he tries to work out what has happened to him, he gets on with the business of being a cop.  Of course, things were different back then.  That’s the main element of the show – a 2000s cop working in 1973 conditions.  His boss and colleagues are corrupt, racist, sexist and violent, in a time before computers, cell phones, DNA profiles and all the accoutrements that today’s upwardly mobile young cop takes for granted.  The US version has aired for only three weeks and was quite good in parts, though it did lay the references to the 1970s on pretty thickly.  I wonder if they will limit it to 2 seasons or, if it is successful, if they’ll drag it on forever.  One thing I am very certain of is that when the time comes they won’t give it the same ending as the British version.

Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? was the invention of Celador Productions in London and was a success from its first showing in 1998 and continues to this day.  Almost from the start, Celador were successful in selling the format to overseas production companies.  With minor variations, every version is the same: a general knowledge quiz with the audience in a circle around the host and contestant who sit in high chairs facing each other, with music and lights designed to create an atmosphere of tension.  The contestant must answer every question correctly and wins a money prize that increases with each correct answer, up to a maximum of a million pounds (UK), dollars (US).  Of course, for US players, the million is subject to income tax, while in Britain if you win a million you keep it as competition winnings are tax free. 

The show’s gimmicks are the lifelines, which the contestant can use to help him answer the questions.  The format was so successful that apart from the British original and the version currently showing in the US, there are versions in 48 other countries.

The Office  ran for a total of fourteen episodes in Britain (2 series and a two-part Xmas special) starting in the summer of 2001.  It was far more successful, I suspect, than its creators, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, ever imagined it would be, and  it attracted a cult following when it was transmitted on BBC America a couple of years later.  This sitcom has no audience, and takes the form of a documentary being filmed at a branch office of a paper manufacturing company, where the branch manger who has been promoted beyond his abilities tries to run the place as best he can within the limits of his own incompetence and unfortunate personality. 

The BBC licensed the format and versions were made and shown in France, Germany and Brazil.  The NBC version is the fourth international version and has been very successful from the start, mainly due to the excellence of the cast, led by Steve Carell.  It still maintains the faux documentary format, though that does seem pretty tenuous after all these years, and will probably just go on and on until people get tired of it.  Since Gervais and Merchant are earning far more money from the franchises than they ever did from the original programme, they have said they are happy for Steve Carell to go on being Michael Scott forever.

American Idol  and  America’s Got Talent  are both Simon Cowell franchises which originated in England and have spread worldwide.   The first one was Pop Idol, which was an enormous success from the word go.  As I understand it, when they decided to produce an American version the production company, who had always referred informally to the show as “Idol”, called the new US format “the American ‘Idol’” and after a while they decided that that would be the ideal name for it. 

Britain’s Got Talent was a talent show that wasn’t restricted to post-pubescents singing for other post-pubescents, and its formula too was very straightforward and was easy to package and export.

There is nothing new, of course, about amateur talent shows. They just need a gimmick, and in the case of these two it is the hype and the judging.  The real winner is Simon Cowell who, as an agent, has been able to sign up many talented acts who, in effect, have come to audition for him.  In that sense, it is entirely irrelevant to him, and to show business, who wins the competitions.  The phone-in audience will vote for whoever they like at that particular moment  while Cowell will represent people who he thinks have a future. 

Coupling  lasted in Britain for four series.  Because there were six characters, three men and three women, it was sometimes described as a British version of Friends, though apart from the number of characters it bore little similarity.  The plots centred on the love lives of the six, their insecurities and their experiences.  The dialogue was adult, as were the topics, and the combination was very funny.  NBC decided to do an American version in 2003 which would be more or less word for word copies of the British scripts, with six minutes worth of each episode cut out to make room for commercials.  This put the show in a no-win situation. Those who wanted their TV sitcoms to be wholesome and insipid hated it for being too explicit, while those who wanted to enjoy it found that it didn’t go far enough to meet their expectations. After only four episodes were shown, NBC took it off and abandoned the project.

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Hells Kitchen in England was a show with Chef Gordon Ramsay and a group of C-list celebrities who cooked meals for customers in a specially built restaurant.  In his autobiography, Ramsay says that it was one of the worst experiences of his life.  The celebs thought they were going to be making merry chat, tossing jokes back and forth, as they sloshed stuff about in saucepans.  They  had no idea how high pressure an environment a fine dining kitchen is. One even took a swing at Ramsay  when he suggested that in her exhaustion she had been playing to the cameras.  When it was over, he decided never to do it again.

However Fox TV bought the format and then revised it into the excellent show that it is on this side of the pond.  Instead of vapid celebs, the contestants are 20 and 30 somethings who have culinary experience and actually want to cook for a living, in a winner-takes-all contest for a dream job.  Ramsay runs the actual kitchens like a drill sergeant at boot camp, complete with shouting, swearing and food throwing (though his personality away from the kitchen is completely different) yet the contestants seem to adore him.  For the audience, since we can’t taste anything that the contestants cook, the show is about the people, not the food.

Sanford And Son  By the time the British sitcom, Steptoe And Son, came to the end of its life in the 1970s it had been raised almost to the level of a national treasure!  It started as a one-off episode in the days of black and white in the mid sixties, and was picked up for an entire series, then another, then another until it became a fixture of British prime time TV.  It was about a couple welded to each other, one of whom wants to better himself and escape from his situation and the other trying to maintain things as they are.  They were not a married couple, but a father and son, running a junk business.  This was comedy based not on the staples of slapstick and farce, but upon dialogue and characterisation.  It would probably have gone on longer than it did but for the antagonism between the two actors who reached such a state of mutual loathing that at the end they only ever spoke to each other on the set, in character.

The US version was adapted from Steptoe And Son by Norman Lear.  Set in Los Angeles, it was also about a father and son in the junk business.  It ran for five years and in the first years stuck pretty close to the British original,  but moved away somewhat as time passed.  It remained very popular and successful for its five year run.

Fawlty Towers,  about a husband and wife running a second rate seaside hotel, was one of the best British sitcoms ever, and it still gets very high ratings when it is rerun on the BBC.  There were only twelve episodes ever made (six in 1975 and six more, after the BBC begged John Cleese, in 1978).  Cleese refused to sell the episodes to American network TV because each one was 29 minutes long and he knew they would have to cut six minutes out of each one to make room for commercials, which would have made a complete nonsense of them.  They were later shown, uncut, on PBS and were very popular.

There were two attempts at making US versions, neither of which was successful.  Amanda’s, in 1983,  starring Bea Arthur, was the format with, for some reason, the main character (the husband) left out.  It ran for ten episodes.   Sixteen years later CBS brought out Payne, starring John Larroquette and JoBeth Williams.  It was closer to the original than Amanda’s but it was not a success and was cancelled after eight episodes.

All In The Family  was truly an iconic (I hate that word, but there you go) sitcom of the 1970s.  A working class man and wife, living in Queens with their daughter and her husband.  Throw in political differences, prejudice, topical references, and you get a refreshing change from slapstick, mistaken identity and innuendo to the accompaniment of canned laughter. Archie Bunker, played by the brilliant Carroll O’Connor led an excellent cast and the show made its way into the national consciousness.

It was another show adapted by Norman Lear from a British original.  Till Death Us Do Part was far closer to the knuckle and far less artistic.  It had the same set of four characters but it lacked the underlying affection, which they probably would have vehemently denied, between the two male characters. In fact, it had very little warmth at all.  Trivia: the actor who played Mike in Till Death Us Do Part , Anthony Booth, went on to become Tony Blair’s father-in-law.

Eleventh Hour has just started here and I haven’t seen it yet.  It derives from a very short season of  four 90-minute episodes under the same name shown on British TV in 2006, about a government scientist, played by Patrick Stewart, and his detective bodyguard, played by Ashley Jensen.  We saw all four episodes on BBC America and were less than impressed.

Men Behaving Badly was very popular in England, even though it came in for a lot of criticism from prudes and puritans and similar wastes of space.  Two young men (approx 30 probably) share a flat, and behave as unmarried men do. They drink, smoke, look at porn, and don’t understand that there is anything wrong with what they do.  They are also very nice people, without an once of malice in either of them.  One is manager of a small burglar alarm company office, and the other seems to be permanently unemployed.  They are best mates. One has a girlfriend, the other is always trying to seduce the single woman who lives upstairs.   The programme was shown after the 9.00pm watershed, when almost anything goes and censorship standards are considerably relaxed.  The US version was considerably watered down and ran for a season and a half.  Compared with the original, it was suggested that it should be called Men Behaving Quite Well Really.

A few more...   Worst Week – Trading Spaces – Cold Feet – The Antiques Roadshow – Dear John – Max Headroom –Welcome Back Kotter – Queer As Folk – The Weakest Link – Whose Line Is It Anyway?  – What Not To Wear – Touching Evil – Wife Swap – Cracker – Dancing With The Stars

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Comments

[PJ]

Great job, Nicholas!

By the way, I'm not very happy about the planned US remake of Kath & Kim, as its Aussie flavour is such an integral part of its humour.

[AnthonyNorth]

Some classic programmes there. It's hard to think that Fawlty Towers only ran to about a dozen episodes. Such fame from so little. But a marvellous sitcom.

[Laughing Muse]

I miss Max Headroom. It's not even available on DVD...truly sad. The American series had its wobbles; but it was decent.

(/prays for Max Headroom on DVD this Christmas...)

[Nicole Austin]

Wow, I had no ideas we were so unoriginal. LOL! Happy TT!

[Ann Bruce]

I'm still waiting for the American take on Black Adder...but I'm afraid they'll screw it up.

[Nina Pierce]

Until our cable company got cheap, we got BBC. We LOVED it! Coupling is one of my all time favorites! I miss that show. Very creative writing. Nice list Nicholas.

[yasmin]

Happy TT!

[tommie]

Didn't know this....but the most TV I ever watch is cheesy reality TV.

[Malcolm]

Very well done and informative. I've watched a few episodes of the original "Coupling" and found it to be hilarious. I saw the U.S. remake once, but wasn't impressed.

I wonder if the producers of "Please Sir" ever sought legal action against the makers of "Welcome Back, Kotter" because the latter show never acknowledged the British predecessor.

By the way, I didn't do a T13 this week. However, I do have a new poll up and a post about the controversy surrounding Kevin Smith's new movie.

[Carina]

Wow! You did a lot of work on your!! Impressive.

[The Land of Rozz]

Oh my goodness.....I knew about a lot of the reality shows but Sanford and Son??? Three's Company?? I would have never guessed. Those were some of my favorite shows growing up. Great Information! Happy TT!

[Tamy ~ 3 Sides of Crazy]

Great list - thanks for the trivia lesson!!

[Julie]

I was surprised to see Welcome Back Kotter, All In The Family, Sanford and Son, and Three's Company in this list. I had no idea that they were based on English sitcoms! I learn something new every day :)

Great Thursday 13!

[Adelle Laudan]

I never knew about Three's Company. Great list! Happy Halloween!

[FickleMinded]

Great idea,that's quite new to me,although I'm familiar w/ american idol but the rest is something I learned today.
and thanks for the sweet comment on my entry. have a great weekend.

[SandyCarlson]

Didn't know that about All in the Family! Doesn't seem possible, somehow.

[Tobias]

Sanford and Son? Really? Well, you learn something new every day.

[Journeywoman]

I didnt know about All in the Family.

I love Life on Mars.

[Brenda ND]

Wow, very interesting. I had no idea. I would have never guess about Sanford and Son.

[Alice Audrey]

I want to see Man About the House. It sound a lot better than Three's Company.

BTW, sorry about my post today. I didn't mean to leave you shaken.

[Gattina]

I know almost nothing about British or American shows, so I can't comment.

[Joy Renee]

wow i had no idea about so many of these but then my exposure to western pop culture was quite curtailed prior to 1992 and i've been playing catchup ever since. I discovered Three's Company in 1985 and loved it with a guilty conscience until i finally gave myself permission to enjoy loving what i loved in the mid nineties. it's that pesky puritan upbringing--so hard to chuck it even once one recognizes it for upchuck.

i love a lot of BBC TV. I find so much of it smarter and more candid than so much of American TV. i also like that you get six minutes more per half hour! one of my favs was Keeping up Appearances. I wonder what an American Version of that would look like?

well i'm off to google a certain sarah's predilection to book burning. something else i learned while perusing your front page and I thot i was fairly well informed on that subject.

btw thanx for visiting. I came straight here from the tt hub and was still reading your front page when I saw your comment come through. Not sure what time that was but well over an hour. This is why I am always playing catchup with my tt visiting. sigh

[Di]

Even if it was just The Office, that would be enough for me! And while we are at it, I'd like to express my gratitude for the Brits giving us Hugh Laurie, whose American accent on House belies his British roots.

Hope you are doing well...I'm on a deadline and have NO time to write for fun!

[carmen]

Thanks to UK for bringing us Chef Ramsey!

[Teena in Toronto]

And some are/were my favs! I love Gordon Ramsay's shows, both the US version and English version (on our food channel). The English version isn't censored so there's a lot of F-sharps flying around. Ha!

Thanks for stopping by mine :)