Changing Rooms American Style | Morse on DVD© Hunter Peters
Feb 9, 2001
Changing Rooms American Style It looks so simple on paper. Take a successful television series, one that has
been tweaked and honed to perfection by highly trained professionals and is beloved of it’s
rather large audience, and transplant it to another, really quite similar, country. The
language may be 90% the same but something always seems to get lost in the translation
when British telly programs are re-made for American audiences. The latest attempt is Trading
Spaces, an American Changing Rooms clone that has got all the ingredients of
the original but can’t seem to mix them up properly to get that certain balance of
entertainment and DIY info that Carol Smillie and her team serve up so
effortlessly. Trading Spaces is so superficially similar to Changing Rooms that it becomes one of the
show’s disadvantages, all too easily pointing up the superiority of the original.
Trading Spaces offers an easy to look at hostess with a winning smile but Alex Mcleod
is no Carol Smillie, but how can she be, Smillie is, after all, one of Britain’s
most popular personalities. The dueling designers are one of Changing Rooms great
strengths, we’re talking personality to spare with the likes of Laurence Llewelyn
Bowen and Graham Wynne but Trading Spaces saddles it’s homeowners with
plastic, demographically correct (TS is clearly courting a Gen X / Gen Y audience) sleep
aides. The designers may well be highly trained and respected professionals in their field
but it certainly isn’t on display within the confines of the program. Don’t even get me started on Trading Spaces’ Handy Andy Kane wannabe,
a laid back slacker/carpenter (!?) who hopefully isn’t doing his best work in the
series, though in “Ty”’s defense he is the one member of the cast
with an actual personality , it’s just unfortunate it’s not a particularly
appealing one. Beyond the questionable casting and the inevitable cultural differences between
the two series homeowners (the American’s often have newer, posher homes and are far
less engaging in front of the cameras than their British counterparts) the greatest sin
committed by Trading Spaces is that it is neither entertaining nor educational, the
re-decorating projects are often laughable simple and each episode is painfully stretched
out to fill an hour long time slot. Where Changing Rooms is breezy, affable, instructive
and rather suspenseful, Trading Spaces is merely shallow and soporific. In the end Trading Spaces seems more like a counterfeit than a remake and proves
that it’s not only the classic brit-com (Fawlty Towers, Men Behaving Badly,
Red Dwarf) and crime dramas (Cracker, Sherlock Holmes) that American
producers can figure out how to reproduce here in the States.
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