Edward
Bartender
- Messages
- 25,081
- Location
- London, UK
Some sitcoms translate successfully to another culture, The Office being a case in point. Many others don't. Brighton Belles is notorious as a UK attempt to do The Golden Girls. Six episodes were made, but as memory serves the first series was pulled midway so bad was the reception. It had good comic talent in it (including Sheila Hancock), but it clearly just didn't hold up to the original. I think ultimately some comedy has a universality to it beyond the geographical setting - a show like Faulty Towers or Father Ted is that. Those become very hard to remake, because there's nothing that really needs changed. As opposed to a show like Life on Mars, where so much of the humour came from cultural familiarity and nostalgia for an earlier time that was radically different in the UK and the US, where you need to change the details to make the same joke. Much like some of the names in Asterix books change across different language editions, allowing the audience to get the joke (many of the names being rooted in puns). One of the worst remakes I've seen in that regard was Days Like These, a UK remake of That Seventies Show. They did try to relocate it to the UK (set in Luton, references to the 77 jubilee, and all the rest), but there was far too much (including several characters clearly straight-lifted from US stoner culture in a way which was just totally alien for the suburbs in the UK in 1977) that didn't work.
Of course, Fawlty Towers was also so much about the specific people: Connie Booth and John Cleese writing and portraying those characters became them so much that anyone else playing Fawlty is really just someone else doing an impression of Cleese. Same reaction from me as when I heard they were doing a stage musical of Groundhog Day - why would you even bother watching someone else pretend to be Bill Murray when you could just watch Bill Murray?
