British Invasion

Why U.S. Audiences Are Chuffed to Bits for U.K. Imports

By JANICE RHOSHALLE LITTLEJOHN -- Multichannel News, 2/28/2011 12:01:00 AM

The British are coming.

In January alone, three scripted series based on hit shows from the United Kingdom premiered to respectable ratings and big buzz on American U.S. channels.

In its first week, 3.6 million viewers tuned in to Showtime’s Shameless, about a dysfunctional working-class clan headed by William H. Macy as a derelict dad. The series, adapted by executive producer John Wells (ER), has become the top-performing freshman series in the network’s history.


Sunday-night show Top Gear — hosted by comedian and car buff Adam Ferrara, champion rally racer Tanner Foust and racing analyst Rutledge Wood — has already been picked up for a second season. Production on its sophomore season begins this spring.

Syfy’s Monday-night launch of Being Human, the story of three roommates — a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost, trying to live as everyday mortals — was the channel’s most-watched winter scripted premiere since 2005, with 1.96 million tuning in. It was also the highest-ever scripted original on the channel with female audiences — 58% of the 1 million adults 18-49 who watched were women.

And the Feb. 1 premiere of Lifetime’s maternityward docuseries One Born Every Minute was that network’s most-watched unscripted series debut. It more than tripled the year-ago viewing figures for its time slot on Tuesdays at 10 p.m., averaging 740,000 adults 18-49 and 577,000 women 18-48, according to Nielsen.

“In the U.K., they have a robust infrastructure to come up with interesting content on television,” History senior vice president of development and programming David McKillop said. “We’re taking some of those ideas that we think we can work and we’re adapting them to our specific brands.”

Lifetime president Nancy Dubuc added: “They always need to be redone. It’s not easy just to import the U.K. show into a U.S. market and expect it to perform.”

Of course, the idea of adapting U.K. favorites into U.S. hits is not new. Since the ’60s, American audiences have enjoyed such adaptations as All in the Family (from Till Death Do Us Part) to Sanford and Son (from Steptoe and Son) to Three’s Company (Man About the House). Th e most recent U.K.-spawned megahit is NBC’s The Office, adapted from the Ricky Gervais- created BBC series of the same title. And several U.S. game shows and reality programs were inspired by series from across the Atlantic.

But the current wave of revisionist fare stateside has increased significantly as cable executives look for more original programming that embraces a wider scope of formats and ideas. Because new shows are so expensive, working with a team that knows a format’s requirements is a production shortcut.

And increasingly, British production executives are becoming more involved in the making of U.S. remakes.

“In the past, you just replaced the producing talent and said, ‘Now we’ll show you guys how we do it in America,’ ” said BBC America president Herb Scannell. “Now, some of the networks are saying, ‘wait a second,’ and are seeing the talent among executive producers that need to be a part of what we’re doing over here in America.”

Attitudes toward the U.S. TV industry have also evolved on the other side of the pond, said Jane Tranter, a longtime British television executive now heading BBC Worldwide Productions.

“Over the past decade, Brits have woken up to some of the most amazing television that Americans have been making and thinking we can combine our idiosyncratic spirit and some of our eccentric charm and creativity to do things that are both quintessentially English but have the ability to travel,” Tranter said. As executive vice president of BBC Worldwide Productions, Tranter has crossed the cultural divide by “reforming” British hits like Top Gear, Dancing With the Stars (ABC) and What Not To Wear (TLC), as well as developing such new programs as Torchwood: Miracle Day (coming to Starz in July).

Shot in Wales and the U.S., Torchwood: Miracle Day is an original series from British writer Russell T. Davies, who created the popular series, a spinoff of Doctor Who (whose earlier iterations aired in the U.S. on BBC America). The series’ lead character, omnisexual time traveler Capt. Jack Harkness (John Barrowman), returns to the series alongside new American characters played by Bill Pullman and Mekhi Phifer.

It’s the same series with more of an international context. “We’re looking to reignite that pre-existing fan base and dramatically expand upon it,” Starz Media managing director Carmi Zlotnik said.

While broadcasters tend to be skittish about mature themes involving class, race, politics or sex and sexuality, cable is happily allowing producers to push the envelope. It took John Wells, executive producer of such hits as ER and The West Wing, two and a half years to negotiate the rights for Shameless, a dark comedy with dramatic social undertones about America’s economic class system, based on a U.K. series with the same name.

“There was a large sense within the community of people that we showed it to that this world didn’t exist in the United States, which I took exception to,” Wells said. “This only changed in a substantive way when the recession hit and people started to feel like, ‘Oh, there are going to be a lot of people struggling now.’ ”

Wells consulted with Paul Abbott — creator of the British series and an executive producer on Showtime’s version — to ensure the right tone. Happy to have a producing partner who understood his material, he was even more thrilled when he knew the U.S. cast got it, too.

“I remember one day vividly walking in and realizing that the actors knew fully what thet were handling, and realizing it was a bigger product that they were building,” Abbott said. “So watching their excitement and the mischief on their faces was wonderful, because I knew why they were smiling like that.”

While there is certainly no formula for making a hit adaption (just ask the U.S. producers of Coupling, NBC’s hastily cancelled 2003 adaptation), there are some guidelines.

“I think being too slavish to the original can be a trap,” Showtime Entertainment president David Nevins said. “Although the pilot (for Shameless) was incredibly close to the British one, John has made it feel very intrinsically American. The further you get away from the pilot the more I think it veers off of the British show.”

Rob Pursey, executive producer of the BBC’s version of Being Human, said he’s found a great partnership with Syfy and his U.S. executiveproducing team, Michael Prupas (Pillars of the Earth), Jeremy Carver (Supernatural) and Anna Fricke (Everwood).

The challenge for him came in translating the format. American series typically run for 22 episodes, while in the U.K., shows typically run as six-episode serials.

“I was intrigued to see how that would work in a new cultural environment and I felt pretty confident that that writers needed to work out which stories to tell within that prism,” Pursey said.

Syfy president of original programming Mark Stern added: “There’s also a challenge with adaptation to understand where the success of the import is coming from [whether] it’s the concept and the premise or is it from the chemistry of that group of people, and in any successful series, I think it’s both.”

While adaptations are growing in popularity here, it’s rare for American shows to be reimagined in England. Th e first, Law & Order: UK premiered successfully on the British telly in 2010 based on original scripts from Dick Wolf’s mothership series. The U.K. L&O now runs on BBC America, where it’s found fans among U.S. viewers and TV critics.

“I suspect the reason Law & Order: U.K. does well in the U.S. isn’t because we reinvented the wheel,” said head writer Chris Chibnall, “but because Dick Wolf’s original idea and the way in which all the L&O production teams realized it was brilliant and remains so today.”

“And I never forgot one of Dick’s first pieces of advice to me,” Chibnall added: “Don’t f*** it up.”

COMING TO AMERICA

“IT WAS A MISERABLE EXPERIENCE — AN UTTER DISASTER,” SAID Beryl Vertue, the grand dame of British TV on her attempt to bring sitcom Coupling to NBC in 2003.

The high-profile failure followed another letdown at the same network, which had tried and failed to adapt Men Behaving Badly in 1996. But Coupling was the last straw.

“We haven’t done anything on American television since,” she said. “It’s too frustrating.”

She’s had her share of frustrations with American broadcasters. In 1967, the former agent first jetted to the U.S. to sell the British sitcom Steptoe and Son. A deputy chairman of the Stigwood Organisation, she had already sold the format in other parts of Europe and decided to give the U.S. market a try.

A pilot was shot for NBC, but the series went nowhere “because they didn’t understand the core of what made it work,” she said.

Several years later, she’d gotten word that a then-film producer named Norman Lear was interested in her series, Till Death Do Us Part, for CBS.

“For want of a better word, I kind of auditioned him a number of times during our meetings, and the more I talked to him I thought, if he didn’t get it right, then no one would,” Vertue said.

Lear’s adaptation — which debuted on CBS on Jan. 12, 1971, as All In the Family — was an instant hit. She later sold Steptoe and Son to Lear, which debuted in 1972 on NBC as Sanford and Son.

Vertue now heads up Hartswood Films, which she founded in 1980, and has produced numerous comedies and dramas including Upstairs, Downstairs, which had a 13-episode run on CBS as Beacon Hill in 1975, and the small-town game show It’s a Knock Out, which ABC ran as Almost Anything Goes from 1975-76.

She runs Hartswood with her daughters Debbie Vertue and executive producer Sue Vertue, whose husband, Steven Moffat, created Coupling and Sherlock and is the current executive producer of the iconic British sci-fi series Doctor Who.

A member of the Royal Television Society Hall of Fame, Vertue was honored in December 2010 by the Women in Film and Television and received a 2004 BAFTA award (the British Emmy equivalent) for her contributions to television.

In recent years, she’s become a fan of U.S. cable programs such as Mad Men and The Tudors.

“I’m quite impressed by what the American cable networks are doing — they’re quite keen to take risks and I just get the feeling from what I’ve heard from other writers, there’s not quite so many people helping,” Vertue said.

Would she consider any of her series for an American makeover for cable?

“Provided we had something that we had something that was really right for them,” she said.