If this has been done before, I apologize. My google-fu was turning up nothing!
I love Kitchen Nightmares and Top Gear. I watch them whenever they’re on BBC Canada. Their respective American spinoffs, however, suck. Adam Ferrara looks a little like Richard Hammond, but the show lacks all of the fun of the original, even if the UK celebrities are (sometimes) lost on me…
Similarly, Kitchen Nightmares U.S. has too much cheesy casio keyboard music, and is all about having Ramsay get into a yelling match with whomever is the restaurant manager; I learn nothing about preparing a menu or running a front of house like you do in the British version. At least UK Kitchen Nightmares is cooking-esque. The US one is cheap melodrama.
Are there any other show spinoffs which got sucky across the pond? I never regularly watched the Office or Millionaire, so I can’t judge. Whose line is it anyway? Something else I hadn’t considered?
I have to agree. We do a very poor job over here adapting them.
The two that immediately came to mind were Coupling and The Office.
I understand there was a time when Absolutely Fabulous was going to be remade here, and I was horrified at what might have been done to it.
The original UK version was 10 kinds of excellent fused together to make awesome. The US version was a limp, pale, invalid of a show looking for someone to push its bathchair over to a sunny spot so it could take a nap.
I think *All in the Family *and *Sanford and Son *did pretty well. I didn’t see a lot of the original episodes for those though. Otherwise I’m not fond of the remakes.
I think the British version of “Whose Line is it Anyway” was way better. It had more variety, because there was a rotating cast. Near the end, it was always the same two people (Ryan and Colin), but at least with two rotating spots there was a bit more variety and it wasn’t the same skits every week. Plus, the UK version didn’t have the host getting involved in the improv.
With the American version, it was always the same three people, and the fourth person of the week was barely given anything to do. Every week it was the same: they’d play “party quirks” with the fourth person as the host, which requires no effort. Then Ryan and Colin would do a skit as the two infomercial salesmen. Then they’d give Wayne a song to sing and he’d dance around and shake his ass to make the women in the audience scream - and I don’t deny that Wayne was a talented singer and good looking, but it just got so formulaic.
