Television's foreign affair

Shows based on international hits are flooding the fall lineup. Has the U.S. TV industry run out of fresh ideas?

Editor's note: Read more of our TV Week 2008 coverage.

By Thomas Rogers

Read more: Arts & Entertainment, Arts & Entertainment TV Features, TV Week, Thomas Rogers, TV Week 2008

Sept. 4, 2008 | A few weeks ago, audiences got their first look at "Kath & Kim," NBC's highly anticipated fall sitcom, in a series of short ads featuring Molly Shannon and Selma Blair as Kath and Kim. A mother and daughter dressed like escaped extras from an Olivia Newton-John music video, they screech and whine in their Florida suburban home. In one ad, Kim barges into a house and yells, "I'm getting a divorce. It's over. O-V-U-R!" In another, she sits next to her mother on a couch and says, "Would it make you feel better if you got up and made us some nachos?"

The ads were short, confusing and painfully unfunny. The show is an adaptation of a beloved Australian sitcom of the same name, and when the ads made their way onto YouTube, fans of the original were irked. As one commenter put it, "This is just evidence that America has to steal anything decent another country has and pretend it's theirs." Another commenter called it "Kath & Kim dumbed down for inbred dumb fucks in Alabama." Or, to quote xxRazorBladeHeartxx: "Laaaaaaaaaaaaame."

"Kath & Kim" is one of a conspicuously large number of adapted foreign shows that will appear on American TV this year. Adaptations of foreign TV shows are not a new concept, by any means: "All in the Family," the quintessential American sitcom, was based on the BBC's "Till Death Do Us Part," and "Three's Company" was based on ITV's Britcom "Man About the House." (See our guide to classic American shows born overseas.) But the sheer number of this year's imports suggests that the television industry is undergoing, if not a convulsive transformation, a major change in the way it finds its material.

From ABC's "Life on Mars" to CBS's "Eleventh Hour" and "The Ex List," to Fox's "Secret Millionaire," a remarkable number of this season's high-profile shows are versions of series that have successfully conquered other countries. If 2007 was TV's Year of the Nerd and the Power-Broad, 2008 is shaping up to the Year of the Adapted Foreign TV Show.

The YouTube commenters' vicious reactions, however, speak of the contempt many people in other countries have for a process that shows often undergo on their way to American TV. It's a process that involves changes in tone, pace and theme to make them palatable to American taste. Given this year's import-heavy schedule, it also raises some bigger questions: Why did all these foreign TV shows suddenly show up? Has the American television industry finally run out of ideas? And what, if anything, do changes to these shows tell us about what makes an American audience American?

This past year has been a near-catastrophic one for Hollywood. The writers' strike not only robbed us of several months of Zach Braff's hospital-themed antics, but interrupted the networks' pilot production cycle (in which a large number of pilot episodes for different shows are produced, and the networks then decide which will be picked up). Combined with the lagging economy and rising production costs, a much smaller number of pilots were produced than normal, and without those, the networks have trouble selling ad time and getting advance attention from critics. By adapting foreign material, the networks could circumvent the process and buy scripts with proven track records in another country.

The trend can also be tied to our country's long-standing love affair with Regis Philbin and multiple-choice questions. The late-'90s success of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," a quiz show imported from the U.K., paved the way for the growth of the TV-format market. Networks realized that, not only was it cheaper to buy foreign "formats" than to produce homegrown pilots -- particularly when it came to reality TV and game shows -- but those shows could make them tons of money. With growing competition from cable, they helped networks fill time and cut costs, and eventually networks began adapting more scripted shows as well. In the years since, imports and adaptations like "Survivor," "The Office," "Ugly Betty" and "American Idol" were some of American TV's biggest hits -- others, like "Coupling" and "Viva Laughlin," not so much.

Luckily for executives looking for the next big international thing, they now have more foreign shows to choose from than ever before. Asian, Latin American and Middle Eastern countries are producing more and more original programming -- spurred by the proliferation of specialty channels and satellite television. Add to that the impact of the Internet -- which allows entertainment executives to easily stay abreast of popular programs in other countries -- and the growth of foreign-themed specialty cable (like BBC America) and you've got an American TV industry that's intensely aware of what television shows are popular in other parts of the world. "Historically, we've tended to bring in shows from the Anglophone world," says Joseph D. Straubhaar, the Amon G. Carter Centennial Professor of Communication at the University of Texas. "Now we're looking beyond the places we used to look." This year's imports include shows from the U.K., Israel, Canada, Japan and Australia, with shows from Argentina and New Zealand currently in development.

In their journey to the U.S., however, most of these shows undergo at the least some minor surgery -- and sometimes a complete overhaul. Upon arriving in America, the questions on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," for example, suddenly became much easier. "Ugly Betty" became considerably less ugly, "Queer as Folk" grew more campy, "The Office" got more romantic, and, well, "Coupling" stayed as awful as it always was.

"The most common change you have to make in bringing a show from Britain to the U.S. is a faster pace," says Chris Coelen, the executive producer for "Secret Millionaire," Fox's upcoming adaptation of the British reality show. "I think it's just what Americans are used to," he says. Coelen has helped adapt scores of British shows for American television, including "Wife Swap." In the past two years, his company, RDF, has sold 11 foreign formats to American TV. "It's big business for us," he says.

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