13 posts tagged “tv series”

Great news! Flight of the Conchords has received three Emmy nods for directing, writing, and original music and lyrics. It didn’t get an Emmy nomination for best comedy series, which I think is a sin.
   Not bad for a show conceived by a bunch of Kiwis, even if it did take American money and HBO to get it off the ground.
   And thank goodness it did—how else would it have become so widely received? I can’t see a TV3- or TVNZ-funded Conchords cracking the US market—it would, like Outrageous Fortune, have been remade at best.
   Good luck to Bret, Jemaine and the others associated with the show.

Samantha1

If ABC hadn’t advertised on Lucire last year with its series Samantha Who? I would have wondered what folks were talking about.
   For instance, I probably would have thought it was the first proper Chinese–American sitcom, Samantha Hoo. Yes, folks, east Asians on prime-timenetwork television. Yellow-skinned Americans with a rice cooker. This hasn’t been seen since Margaret Cho was in All American Girl. We haven’t had “our Cosby” emerge in the US yet.
   Samantha Hoo could have been a good series about a Chinese–American woman who wakes up after an accident and discovers she has no memory of her heritage, and thinks she’s white.
   Each episode she discovers something new about her ethnicity that she didn’t know before. The final episode has her speaking Cantonese rather than American English. Laughs all round.
   When it would have been explained to me that it was Who, and not Hoo, I would have then believed this was one of those Doctor Who spin-offs like Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Mysteries.
   Samantha Who is the story of a woman who is the love child between the Doctor and one of his female companions, and seeks to find her estranged father. It is filmed in the United States, so she has an American accent. Along the way, travelling in a white Volkswagen convertible, she pieces together parts of the timelord side of her past, meeting various characters from the main Doctor Who series to mark it as a spin-off: Sarah Jane Smith and K-9, Capt Leithbridge Stewart of UNIT, and someone looking suspiciously like Eric Roberts.
   She is raised to seek out the Doctor and the first-season finalé leads to her admission of a growing romance between her and Capt Jack, who also has an American accent (see, now the casting makes sense). The final of the series, meanwhile, sees her finally find her father, but not before Greg ‘B. J. McKay’ Evigan, as the Master, tries to claim that he is her biological father. Paul Reiser guests as the Doctor.
   As it turns out, Samantha Who? is actually an American TV series starring Christina Applegate, whose memory loss has caused her to blank out that she once played Kelly Bundy.

The Independent on Sunday has a good article on American remakes of British shows, though I should add that Britain has had its share of remaking others’. Anyone remember how Married with Children (Married for Life) and Who’s the Boss? (The Upper Hand) did not translate that well in the UK?
   Ready for the American treatment are:

ABC
Life on Mars

CBS
The Eleventh Hour (prod. Jerry Bruckheimer, starring British actor Rufus Sewell)
Worst Week (based on The Worst Week of My Life)

NBC
Top Gear
Gavin and Stacey

Big screen
State of Play (to star Helen Mirren, Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck)

Also coming
The Vicar of Dibley
Footballers’ Wives

   Don’t forget the Americans are also redoing Opportunity Knocks with Ashton Kutcher, though the concept sounds a little different from the original, Kath & Kim from Australia and Good Behavior (née Outrageous Fortune) from New Zealand (already remade in the UK as Honest with Amanda Redman).
   They join The Office, which of course has been a big hit in the US and perhaps led the way with this current crop, long enough for people to have forgotten Cracker with the late Robert Pastorelli. And, of course, American Idol and America’s Got Talent are rehashes of British shows.
   Once upon a time there were many versions of Popstars, which originated in New Zealand. Pity we now license New Zealand Idol, Stars in Their Eyes and Strictly Come Dancing. At least when the Americans remake things, they generally pick better source material.

Isn’t it far too early to be nostalgic for a Beverly Hills, 90210 revival?
   American networks don’t think so: it’s back in the (northern) autumn, called 90210 and produced by Rob Thomas (who’s also doing the US version of Outrageous Fortune, called Outrageous Behavior).
   More at Canada.com.
   Normally revivals take some 20 years though they seem to come around the time of Hollywood writers’ strikes.
   And will fans of the old watch the new if it doesn’t have returning stars? That would be like Grease 2 not having Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta.

Ian Wylie at the Manchester Evening News, a big Ashes to Ashes fan, has info on the second series—and there may even be a third.
   Highlights from his blog:

ASHES To Ashes is set to get slightly darker in series two, on the road to unveiling greater mysteries. …

2) Matthew: “Then we started talking about what we call our three year plan, which is if, all things being equal, we can run Ashes To Ashes – if we have a series two – if we can run it beyond series two to series three, as is our hope, we can actually unveil a bigger mystery, a bigger plan. And ultimately reveal a lot more about the characters.”

3) Matthew: “The first series of Ashes To Ashes was more about laying the ground rules again, and just kind of having fun and getting people into the ’81 groove. And then we’ll start playing out the bigger mysteries.” …

14) Matthew: “We changed the mystery in Ashes To Ashes for series one, in that we made it about what the clown represented and what the clown was, and we played a twist with the clown. Because what we wanted to do was play with the idea of someone who thought they knew exactly what was going on, and establish all of that, because we thought that the audience knew exactly what was going on. So we thought, ‘Let’s have a character who is the audience, who has seen Life On Mars and knows what’s happening.’ And then, as I say, refer to the three year plan. The next phase of the three year plan is to undermine that, so that you realise you don’t know what’s going on, and nor does Alex. So it was a bit of a gamble, but we kind of thought we’d get away with that a little bit in the first series because we wanted it to be fun. And we wanted to establish a different tone. And if we’d put a big esoteric mystery into Ashes To Ashes – I mean, I think we’ve got a fairly big mystery. She’s pursued by death, who turns out to be her father. That’s pretty esoteric. But if we’d gone even further with that, I think it would have felt that we were just replaying Life On Mars.” …

28) The American version of Life On Mars. Ashley: “It’s being re-made by a guy called David E Kelley, who is a hero of both of ours – so we went out to Los Angeles to meet him. He was very charming. And, no, we’re having nothing to do with it. We’ve seen a script and it’s…interesting.” …

   So: I am excited about Ashes in 2009 and a little worried about the new Life on Mars in the US—though still hopeful that the two Irish lads who are the new Sam Tyler and Gene Hunt will give it a bit of gravitas.

There’s now a second video from the documentary The Saint Steps in … to Colour on YouTube, detailing how scriptwriter Terry Nation would rehash his scripts for different series. This would be fine years apart, but one week he got caught out on US television when The Saint was rerun with a new episode of The Baron.
   Goodness, de Vere before he met Audrey!
   Ian Ogilvy provides the narration.

We need a break from politics. How about a summary of Life on Mars episodes for those of you who haven’t seen the show? Found on YouTube.

I know white people all look the same, but has anyone noticed that Hugh Barr, running for Council, whose advertisement is on Kent Terrace on a trailer, bears a remarkable resemblance to the fictional Rt Hon James Hacker MP? Subtract Mr Barr’s glasses and it is Paul Eddington. On that note alone, Mr Barr stands a very good chance.

[Cross-posted] Call me superstitious, but I have frequently seen a connection between being covered in Lucire and some subequent good fortune.
   Last year, I interviewed actress Ashley Scott (photographed above by Andrew Matusik) and, soon after, a series that she was working on at the time, Jericho, got picked up by CBS.
   This year, with CBS having cancelled the show, we ran an updated version of my article, this time online.
   I am happy to say that CBS has now ordered seven mid-season episodes of Jericho, largely thanks to fans who campaigned to get it reinstated on the network’s schedule (“hat tip” to Media Blvd.; additional report at Hollywood Reporter).
   OK, so maybe our timing is just impeccable, but I did predict something like this would happen last month.

Here’s another series finalé, this time from 1990. Newhart, starring Bob Newhart, ends with perhaps the most inventive finishing minutes—at least till I see Life on Mars next week!
   Let’s see: he thinks it’s 1990 but in fact … Come to think of it, maybe Life on Mars is going to end like this!