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Lost in Translation

© Hunter Peters

The British viewing public and Anglophiles worldwide are not the only ones to appreciate what British telly has to offer. American TV producers often cast their eyes across the pond in search of a ready-made hit. But what happens after they acquire the rights to a hot show? More often than not they take a perfectly good program and needlessly "Americanize" it beyond recognition leaving most of the attributes that made the show a winner in the first place. That's not to say that these new series aren't sometimes great shows in their own right but it only serves to make one wonder why they bother adapting a series if the final product is going to bear so little resemblance to the original.

Perhaps the most successful telly translator, both critically and commercially, was Norman Lear. In the '70's Lear produced both All in the Family/a> which was inspired by (and was as controversial as) Dernnis Main-Wilson's 'Till Death Us Do Part and Sanford and Son which was based on the classic britcom Steptoe and Son. As outspoken as All in the Family's Archie Bunker may have been, he was merely a cuddly teddy bear when compared with Warren Mitchell's brilliant portrayal of Alf Garnett, the quintessential angry old man. Till Death Us Do Part's supporting cast also blew All in the Family's excellent cast out of the water with the marvelous Dandy Nichols, Una Stubbs and Prime Minister Tony Blair's son-in-law Anthony Booth. Both Sanford and Steptoe worked, with their sons, in the junk business but that's where the similarity ended. Sanford and Son's two-dimensional storylines and focus on Redd Foxx's schtick fall far short of the standards set by Harry H. Corbett and Wilfred Bramble in Ray Galton and Alan Simpson's original series.

Another popular sitcom remade from the British wasThree's Company. For what it was, Three's Company was a success. It was a broad comedy about sex, though in this case it was more about lack of sex, the fact that John Ritter's Jack Tripper wasn't sleeping with his two gorgeous female flatmates. One of the reasons it worked so well is that it didn't fall far from the tree. It was the most similar, of the shows dealt with here, to its originator Man About the House.

A couple of more recent series fall squarely into the "why did they bother buying the rights" category. Bill Cosby's current series on CBS at some point apparently drew upon David Renwick's One Foot in the Grave for inspiration, though why Cosby, or anyone

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