19 posts tagged “tv series”

Law & Order UK (from ITV) has started in New Zealand, and just like most remakes, it’s not as good as the original. It’s not bad, but proves again that sometimes, things should just remain in their original form.
   And before someone pounces on me by saying that Law & Order UK is not a remake, but a spin-off (as has happened on YouTube), then perhaps they could tell me why the script for tonight’s episode here is directly based on an American one (and even credits it)? Sorry, old chap, that makes it a remake, just like all those wonderful American shows and movies such as Three’s Company, Sanford & Son, Life on Mars, Coupling, Cosby, Ugly Betty, Three’s a Crowd, Eleventh Hour, Too Close for Comfort, The Office, Viva Laughlin, Kath & Kim, Payne, Amanda’s, The Prisoner, In Treatment, Worst Week, All in the Family, Good Behavior, State of Play …
   The credits are OK, and at least here there has been some departure from the original, though the trade mark noise that starts each scene is still present.

Here are some more neat finds on YouTube. I have only a vague recollection of this show, but I might be confusing with others that had fake computer messages going across the screen (The Invisible Man, The Gemini Man, The Incredible Hulk, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, etc.). Apparently, it was originally entitled Probe, but was retitled Search (possibly due to a conflict with another TV series). It didn’t last, due to a producer change and the idea of a revolving star each week (mixing between Hugh O’Brian, Doug McClure and Tony Franciosa). But the theme music and titles are great (note the use of the MICR typeface) and very early 1970s. They also hint at the optimism people had toward technology as a tool to aid mankind, in this case, an agency specializing in searches.

Here’s actor Peter Graves from earlier this year, commenting on his 58-year-long (and counting) marriage, and his thoughts on the three Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible films. I thought he was very diplomatic toward a colleague, the sort of respectful, traditional American manner that is very welcome. Mr Graves is still active in Hollywood, from what I understand, and long may he continue to grace our screens with his presence.

   PS.: We all know that Peter Graves is the kid brother of Gunsmoke’s James Arness, and according to this interview, the surname was originally spelt Aursnes. This remains quite a well known surname in Norway, where the family originally hailed from. The Graves surname is from their maternal grandfather’s side of the family.

This was a real find today. I know a lot of Mission: Impossible fans have seen this, but since there is no CNBC down here, it was the first time I saw it. Mike Jerrick (latterly of Fox News) interviews Peter Graves, Greg Morris, Peter Lupus, Lynda Day George and Leonard Nimoy from the original show, around the time of the first Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible movie in 1996. Only Lupus had nice things to say about the movie in a Murdoch Press review that he penned; Graves and Morris were (rightly, in my opinion) critical, with Morris going so far as to say it was ‘insulting’. We also learn that Greg Morris was the prankster on the set of Mission: Impossible; and it’s clear from this interview that the cast had a great deal of camaraderie.

A few more photos for fellow Life on Mars fans. These are stills from La chica de ayer, the Spanish Life on Mars, which débuted on Antena 3 in Spain last Monday.

A lovely American fan has sent me all the episodes of Mr & Mrs Smith, a 1990s TV series that was never shown in full in the US. I believe seven episodes aired there. Australia was the only country that showed all 13 (I understand from Wikipedia that Norway did, too). I have a feeling we only showed seven, at some ungodly hour (New Zealand programmers often do not make very wise calls).
   It was very hard finding the title sequence on YouTube, although it’s an American show. There’s this translated Czech version, though the actress dubbing Maria Bello sounds pretty close to the original:

   The plot: Mr and Mrs Smith are rival industrial spies. After the pilot, the Factory, Mr Smith’s employer, has hired Mrs Smith as well. The second episode sees them posing as husband and wife in suburbia but work on the same side, though with some rivalry and the usual sexual tension that you see in series of this nature (‘Will they? Won’t they?’).
   The split-screen effect was used on all episodes usefully, and the show was very stylish with nice, self-contained stories.
   When a movie with the same name came out a few years later, about two rival spies living in suburbia as a married couple, it was very easy to think that it was a big-screen version of this TV series. The writer claims there was no connection (after all, it wouldn’t have been the first movie with that name), though it does cut the series’ concept very closely.
   Bakula and Bello, however, were far better than Pitt and Jolie.

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.

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.