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The us version of life on Mars is on the FX channel next week, with Harvey Keitel playing Gene Hunt. Wonder how that'll turn out?

Its been cancelled after one series, that tell you how shit it is. Harvey Keitel looks like an aging rent boy more than Gene Hunt

The Americans have tried to make their own versions of our shows before and they usually fail to make them any good. There is a British way of doing irony, sarcasm, employing subtlety and so on, and the yanks can't really emulate it no matter how hard they try to. It may be an interesting series but it wont have the same qualities the UK version had. Rather like comparing Tesco's own brand cola with Coca Cola.

Anyone remember the US version of "Till Death do us Part", was it called "All in the Family" ?

What a pile of poo that was.

Didn't they also do their version of "Steptoe & Son"? Again a pile of .............

max_tranmere wrote:

> The Americans have tried to make their own versions of our
> shows before and they usually fail to make them any good. There
> is a British way of doing irony, sarcasm, employing subtlety
> and so on, and the yanks can't really emulate it no matter how
> hard they try to. It may be an interesting series but it wont
> have the same qualities the UK version had. Rather like
> comparing Tesco's own brand cola with Coca Cola.

Perhaps so, although their version of The Office is supposed to be very good indeed. I haven't seen it, but presumably it works via the American way of doing irony, sarcasm etc.

Remaking aside, btw, what happens when we try to emulate their slick entertainment? We end up with cheap, trite rubbish like Hustle, or that dire supernatural twaddle with Bill Forsythe (Sea of Souls was it?). Where is our Lost, or 24?

The series ending is ridiculous and typically American in that it neatly sews up every last plot thread for the hard-of-thinking. The end sequence is out there somewhere on the internets and is about as pants as you'd expect.
Save yourself several hours and watch something else instead.

For Spider: the Steptoe remake was called Sanford & Son and ran to 135 episodes, whereas there were only 57 Steptoes. Probably the same number of jokes spread over more than double the time!

Originally when the yanks shot the Pilot they had Irish wideboy "actor" Colm Meany (he of Star Trek fame) in the role of Gene Hunt ... though he was quickly dropped as were most of the cast when the first series was commisioned.

Mind you the english version of Law and order with bradley walsh was very good !!

You think thats bad? You should see the series outline they had for Doctor Who when Fox made the TV movie with Paul McGann. The Daleks are suddenly spiders, The doctor leaves Gallifrey on a quest to find his father because his brother, The Master is trying to assume power.

American TV is fucked up with either execs trying to appeal to demographics or lawyers trying to make sure no ones offended.
British TV isn`t much better, its also got the BBC committees and boards trying to line their pockets with liscence payer money

Thanks Snappy.

Sanford & Son 135 x 30 mins = 67.5 hours
Steptoe & Son 57 x 30 mins = 28.5 hours

Do you think the running times will be about the same if you removed all the advert breaks and pauses for canned laughter from the Yank version?

I had the misfortune to watch a episode of Friends once.

It went, very weak joke, pause for laughter. Someone replies with a one-line rejoinder, pause whilst the audience wets itself. Courtney Cox pulls a face, pause whilst the audience woops with delight for the next ten minutes. I was stabbing lighted cigarettes into my eyeballs after about 15 mins.