Why not more remakes of BBC series?

The American Benny Hill. Same shtick and same music.
Would need clever casting to find someone with that impish grin.

Fawlty Towers. No special casting needed. Any former sitcom stars could carry that show.

Monty Python. If they could make The Monkeys as “an imitation British invasion band”, there should be a passable troupe to reprise that series. If only they can get Betty White to take the John Cleese part :smiley:

Those are possibly the three worst ideas I’ve ever heard of in my life.

You’d go far in Hollywood.

Payne (John Larroquette in the Basil role), Amanda’s (Bea Arthur), and Snavely (Harvey Korman) were all based on Fawlty Towers.

And as for Benny Hill (who is surely to America as Jerry Lewis is to France, and fellow British comic Norman Wisdom is to Albania (it’s true) ), it’s a nitpick but his programme was not a BBC show, at least not the 70’s and 80’s stuff broadcast in the U.S.

Congrats. I think you’ve picked three of the most British, most unduplicatable shows ever. IOW, what Miller said.

From the same ‘ideas factory’:

“The Madness of King George III - great! But what happened to parts I and II?”

Oh no need to stop there.
Masterpiece Theatre with all American casts. And change the settings to the US as well.
Dickens in New York. :smiley:

The strength of those shows was not merely finding a warm body to stand in front of the camera, that’s why.

In today’s market, a troup-based show like Python or the Carol Burnett Show would be split up within a season, with each star offered his own hit sitcom and/or talk show that is doomed to failure, because Hollywood believes it is all about putting cattle in front of the camera, about boiling down the formula until there’s nothing but easy-to-digest cliches left. Look at Wayne Brady, the improvisational singer from the American “Whose Line” cast, given his own very short-lived talk show. Nobody really asked themselves if the move made sense, or if Brady would carry a whole show by himself. Witness the frequent splintering of the Saturday Night Live crew, as they go off to ill-fated solo careers.

Also note that the BBC series are 6 shows long, compared to the American season of, what is it now, 26 shows? A situation may be the perfect size for a British TV series, with enough good ideas to go around, and plenty of time to craft and rehearse each show. The same idea spreads really thin over 26 shows.

Boiling “Fawlty Towers” down to “a guy runs a hotel” is really over-simplifying what made the show so successful.

They try every few years and they fail, so that scares them off for a while. Like they did “Coupling”, and it got nowhere.

Not sure how “The Office” plays into this pattern.

Here’s a list of American remakes of British TV shows:

Notice that you never heard of most of the American remakes. That’s because they last half a season and get cancelled. Sometimes they don’t even get beyond a pilot episode. In general, the remakes of ordinary fictional programs don’t work. The American networks think that if you just give the programs an American setting and throw in an American TV star the qualities of the program won’t change. This shows what idiots American TV networks are. Reality programs, quiz programs, and such work better in American versions, but they aren’t really remakes.

Look through the list. I only count six of the fictional programs that lasted any reasonable length of time (All in the Family, Three’s Company, Sanford and Son, Too Close for Comfort, Cosby (the 1990’s show, not the 1980’s one), Queer as Folk, and The Office). I think only All in the Family is really a significant TV program that it was worth the bother to remake.

Could Firefly be said to be closer to Blake’s 7 than any other TV SF to date?

Fish writes:

> Witness the frequent splintering of the Saturday Night Live crew, as they go off
> to ill-fated solo careers.

This isn’t a parallel example of what you were talking about at all. It may be true that often actors leave hit shows too early, only to find that they have no success in other TV shows or in movies, and the TV show that they left is worse for their absence. That’s not what happens when a regular cast member leaves Saturday Night Live. It was designed to be a show where the cast changes every few years. Saturday Night Live may or may not be any good at the moment, but it wouldn’t be a better show if it had kept the same cast for the past 32 years.

Amanda’s* (I had blocked out the name) was one of the worst shows I have ever seen. IIRC they used some of the exact plots from Fawlty Towers episodes and made them completely unfunny.

I suppose we are going with British shows and not just BBC. Cybil Shepard’s show (was it Cybil?) may not have been a remake but it was a ripoff of Absolutely Fabulous. A ripoff that missed the entire point of the show.

Although the responses have been good, I’ll simply note that the main reason that there are not more “remakes” of famous British sitcoms is that most such shows are funny precisely because of their Britishness. They often fail to translate well.

One show I thought could have translated was Butterflies. Yes, we wouldn’t have two teenage sons on the “dole,” but there are translations that are almost as funny. And even an American housewife should be able to do better than to produce custard that still thinks it is milk. :smiley:

And was a mix of “Friends” and “Seinfeld”, so bringing it over here didn’t really make sense in the first place.

Don’t forget the remake of Absolutely Fabulous called High Society that bombed horribly because theydidn’t want to remake with the booze and drugs.

That would be like trying to make 24 without the interrogation and explosions.

ABC tried to do Red Dwarf.

I think us “yanks” are too smegheaded to appreciate those shows. :slight_smile:
Seriously, I don’t think it ‘sticks’ with most americans. BBC offerings tend to need intelligence.

It seems to me like Americans try to remake virtually any show which is successful elsewhere. Sometimes the results are okay – “The Office” is watchable, “Ugly Betty” is almost as good as the Colombian “Yo Soy Betty La Fea”. But the results are more often crap, and an American version of Monty Python or Benny Hill is nearly unthinkable. Similarly, I can’t foresee an American version of “Sin Tetas No Hay Paraiso”, another Colombian show.

You’re forgetting the show that Letterman credits for his long-running Will It Float segment, the British hit “Is It Buoyant”

On the other hand, All in the Family, Sanford and Son, Dear John, and Three’s Company were all successful American translations of Britcoms.