How is it?
Only programmes made for the BBC. As the BBC don’t have adverts.
Along with creating time limitations, commercials dictate certain structural constraints on US sit-coms. There is a need to write with the advertising break in mind, loosely dividing a show into two acts. A slow build of tension which works so well in shows like Fawlty Towers and Blackadder would be interrupted by the quarter-hour break in a US version. An HBO program like Curb Your Enthusiasm takes great advantage of their freedom from such restrictions.
I think this thread would benefit from mention of this sorry little episode.
Oh the shame.
People who live in glass houses, and all that…
Oh, it’s horrible. Sorry, I sort of figured that was taken for granted. 
You also picked up the distinctly British habit of being picayune. 
I know you said ‘often’; I was just teasing.
The industry term for that is “high-concept”. For example:
“Picture this, it’s “Die Hard” but in a convent!” or
“It’s “Triumph of the Will” but with midgets!”
That sort of thing… and it directly, as was said, relates to marketability and the assumption that U.S. audiences won’t stretch to accept a “new” idea in movies. If you can’t present your script with a “high-concept” descriptor your chance of getting major studio backing is nil.
Which is why we get multi-million doller piles of crap. And/or the same directors getting a free pass to make crap-fest after crapfest because lightning struck them once.
Argh!
I always thought the American pilot for Red Dwarf had the Singing/Dancing Demon from Buffy the Vampire Slayer as Cat, not Terry Farrell.
And I’m pretty damn sure that while Colin Mochrie was in the Brit version of Whose Line, he’s actually Canadian (making 40% of the cast of the American version Canadian).
As for the OP, Terry Pratchett has a good line about it, something along the lines of: I always meet people with loads of great ideas and no money who want to turn my novels into a movie- or they’re Americans.
But I think one huge problem with TV shows in the US is how they’re marketed and scheduled. I swear sometimes-- hell, make that often!-- shows are hyped beyond all belief (like Coupling), or they yo-yo around the week so that nobody can find them.
OK … wanted to make sure I understood you… you’re saying “You Again” was an example of getting it right? I remember that show. Not only was it the worst thing I’ve ever seen, it was probably the worst thing I could imagine. [Chandler Bing voice]And I’m not just talking television[/Chandler Bing voice].
cough 
youre correct about the apostrophes (oops, plurals dont require them), but you totally proved my point regarding American understanding of British regional accents as Geordies (people from around Newcastle), are well known for adding “like” to the end of every sentence.
Yeah, I did mean non-Aussie films. A few Aussies have been seen in some older British films on WW2 (mainly North Africa and Asia), but not many, and I cant think of one American film with an Aussie soldier mentioned.... even though we did alot better in Vietnam than they did. Oh, maybe thats why
Has anyone mentioned Breaker Morant yet? Aussie movie of our hero in the Boer war.
The reason is that American Tv producers (and, usually, movies producers) are incredibly conservative and cautious guys who are chiefly interested in making money, not in produicing good shows. If they can produce something that a lot of people will watch and that they can sell the syndication rights for, they’ve done their job. They want to avoid opvertaxing the minds of watchers, or of offending anyone, so they staty away from creative, strong, or intellifgent shows if they can.
The problem is that this philosophy produces weak and inspid shows, and a lot of people actually do like things with intelligence, wit, opinions, and quality. So TV is in a weird balancing act that is forced to take occasional chances that can turn out good shows, and awful ones. Twilight Zone was great, for instance. So were a lot of other shows. Most shows are terrible.
The good thing about shows based on British originals is that they’ve been tried and tested. Aha! You’ve bought a known quantity. All we have to do is remove the things that offend people and/or make them work too much. If we’re lucky, the emasculated version will still pack 'em in. If not, we’ve only lost X amount of money, instead of what we could have lost by starting from scratch. So they take a show like Absolutely Fabulous, remove everything that made it worth watching, and didn’t fret too much when it died.
By the way:
**
SmackFu, I think the 2nd “King Kong” was better than the first? **
They can cure these delusions now.
Well, the drugs haven`t quite kicked in yet
In England, its illegal to have any more than 12 minutes of promotions/ads within any hour of airtime, and its also illegal to have the ad breaks too close together… which thankfully spares us from the American curse of “Coming up next…”, and after being brainwashed for a few minutes you see the credits of the show, then another ad-break. Should be illegal in the USA as well. Unfortunately, as time goes on Australia is becoming more and more Americanised, especially in it`s tv laws.
I thought “You Again” was a half-decent port of an English show, but I was a kid and I saw it in Australia before I came to England and saw the real deal.
Im glad that so many Americans here agree about the terrible state of their British tv molestations (I cant comment on tv in general there as I dont live there)..... but is there anything you can do about it? Can some rich person start up a World tv cable company in the USA, screening the original series? Can you all get BBC USA? Can you all write to the press and the tv execs demanding they stop the fiddling and show the original that they bought the rights to anyway and stop treating the viewing public as morons or being scared of the over-religious?
Well, a lot of the BBC shows show up on US Public Television, and we get BBC USA now, so we can see a lot of the originals. Sometimes they show up elsewhere, as on Comedy Central. To tell the truth, something occasionally slips through the US commercial television mediocrity filter and shows up on regular TV. I first saw Monty Python’s Flying Circus on an NBC TV summer replacement show for Dean Martin. It was pretty cut up, but it was there. They ran The Prisoner as a summer replacement, too – two years in a row!
I’d wager that not all American versions are awful. All in the Family was gutsy and took on contemporary issues, and lasted one long time. But I never saw the British original to compare it with.
And I have to admit that, much as I usually like the originals, neither Pepper Mill nor I can stand The Office.
Yeah, that’s the version I have. I was poking around the BBC website last night for a completely unrelated reason, and happened across a page that said there were two separate attempts to do an American Red Dwarf pilot, which explains a lot.
FTR, Cablevision does not offer BBC America on either its premium or digital modes, at least in the Bronx. Unless I move, I can’t get it at all–my building does not allow us to have satellite dishes either.
After reading this am I the only one who was thinking why do moles have there own TV stations in Austrailia? Must be a figure of speech :smack: .
In my defence, my brain was conditioned into thinking about TV stations from the previous posts…
eh???
molestations as in molested… to molest, ravage. Although Aussie tv is a bit underground. sorry :dubious:
You must get really confused when people talk about molasses, then.
Yes, because the two shows were nothing alike. Granted they were both sit-coms about a group of three men and three women, all single and in the mid-twenties, living is a big city. And admittedly both had a ditzy woman, a dim-witted ladie’s man, a gorgeous girl, a joking sidekick, a neurotic girl, and a geeky guy. And both shows were basically thirty minutes of sexual innuendo.
But they were completely different because on Friends the ditzy girl was a blonde and on Coupling - a wholey original show made by people who never saw a single episode of Friends in fact they never even heard of any such series - the ditzy girl was a brunette.