A World of Imports in TV’s New Season

[Sylph]

August 26, 2008

A World of Imports in TV’s New Season

By BILL CARTER

Only a year ago network television was in a frenzy to hire foreign-born actors to star in American shows. This year the trend is shifting: American actors are increasingly appearing in foreign shows.

But they’re not going anywhere to do it. The foreign shows are coming to them.

Among the new entries on the fall television lineup and the lists of projects in development, a significant percentage started with an idea hatched in some distant locale.

ABC’s one new scripted show for the fall season, “Life on Mars,” is an adaptation of a well-regarded British detective series. NBC’s “Kath and Kim” is an Americanized version of Australia’s biggest comedy hit.

CBS’s “Worst Week” started as a British comedy series; its “Eleventh Hour” was a British drama. And “The Ex-List,” an hourlong romantic comedy on CBS, was called “Mythological Ex” in Israel, where it originated.

Fox is developing a telenovela from Argentina. Even HBO’s half-hour drama “In Treatment” is based on an Israeli show.

“I keep saying, ‘Next stop, Ethiopia,’ ” said Dana Walden, a president of 20th Century Fox Television, which is producing both “Life on Mars” and “The Ex-List.”

“It’s all following on the success of ‘The Office’ and ‘Ugly Betty,’ ” Ms. Walden said. (“The Office” originated in Britain, “Ugly Betty” in Colombia.)

The foreign wave also follows the Hollywood writers’ strike. That was a factor, several television executives conceded, because networks needed scripts. But they say this is not the only reason shows from around the globe are such hot commodities.

“The world is shrinking,” said Kevin Reilly, the president of entertainment for the Fox network. “We’ll take a good idea from anywhere.”

That was not always the case. Way back in the ’70s, networks took a sudden liking to British formats thanks to hits like “All in the Family” (in Britain, “Till Death Do Us Part”), “Sanford and Son” (adapted from “Steptoe and Son”) and “Three’s Company” (originally “Man About the House”).

But after that British invasion, Hollywood isolationism set back in.

“There was a great degree of American arrogance,” Ms. Walden said. Mr. Reilly said that Hollywood believed it had more than enough talent to go around.

Then competition increased, Mr. Reilly said; cable networks began creating shows, “and the talent pool got stretched thin.”

The emergence of “The Office” as a hit meant more than anything, though it was not initially embraced as a welcome import. Ben Silverman, now co-chairman of NBC Entertainment, brought “The Office” to the United States as a producer. It was no easy sell. “There was a very U.S.-centric attitude,” Mr. Silverman said.

This was true even though by that time foreign reality formats like “Survivor” and “American Idol” had transformed American television. Mr. Silverman had been in the middle of many of those early format deals as an agent, having worked in London and established international contacts.

His first import, a comedy called “Coupling,” was a misbegotten flop for NBC, but he continued to pursue format rights. “The world had been looking at our shows,” he said, and the creators of programming in other countries had been improving their own.

Before “The Office” broke through, he acquired the Colombian telenovela that became ABC’s “Ugly Betty.” Mr. Silverman had also secured the rights to “Kath and Kim” from its Australian creators. (Now wearing his NBC cap, he has steered a comedy from Peru called “My Problem With Women” to a production company headed by Justin Timberlake.)

Nina Tassler, the president of CBS Entertainment, saw an import, “Viva Laughlin,” a remake of the British show “Viva Blackpool,” wipe out quickly last fall. She was unfazed.

She leapt at the chance to acquire the American adaptation of the British comedy “Worst Week” after NBC passed on it. And when she heard a one-line show premise — a woman searching through a lifelong list of ex-boyfriends to find her true love — it was no disadvantage that the show came from Israel.

“I said, ‘Sold.’ I loved the idea,” Ms. Tassler recalled. She had the same reaction after watching all 12 episodes of that show, “Mythological Ex.”

Ms. Tassler said that while “The Ex-List,” the American version, hit on universal themes, it also helped that “Mythological Ex” was popular in Israel. “In many ways their culture is similar to ours,” she said.

Ms. Walden echoed that thought. “The people in places like the U.K. are not so different from ourselves,” she said.

Once a format is bought, the crucial step is marrying the idea to an American writer who can work through the nuances, reshaping it to fit American idioms and sensibilities. As Mr. Silverman put it, an American producer must “wrap it in the right cloth.” He cited his experience in landing Greg Daniels to create the American version of “The Office,” seen as a daunting task by fans of the British original.

Mr. Daniels had a simple insight. Mr. Reilly, a champion of the show when he was at NBC, recalled, “He’d say, ‘I’m doing the exact same series but with 10 percent more hope.’ ”

Mr. Daniels said in an e-mail message that when the show’s creators, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, ended their series after just 13 episodes, “I felt like they had thrown away a perfectly good toy that I would be happy playing with for years.”

“The original version of ‘The Office,’ ” he added, “was so good that it was more of a producing challenge than a writing challenge, a challenge in casting and execution.”

Indeed, adapting a foreign show has certain advantages, the major one being that writers usually have many episodes to examine how the creators worked out the kinks. “We’re buying the development process,” Mr. Reilly said. “We’re buying the learning curve.”

Michelle Nader, who created the American version of “Kath and Kim,” said she had watched all four seasons of the Australian show. “I really, really studied it,” she said. “I feel like it’s in my cellular memory.”

But, she added, “I’m not doing that show.” The process has proved more difficult than she expected, she said: “This is a trickier undertaking than most people think.” After another writer tried and failed to translate the series, she said, her breakthrough came when she realized, “I had to make it my own.”

Ms. Nader has dropped one major character from the original, eliminated the lower-class accents and reset the central relationship to something closer to home. “What opened it up for me was making it about my own life, myself and my mother.”

Now every network and production studio has scouts all over the world. “We’re looking at things in Ireland, Sweden, all over,” Ms. Walden said.

Still, Mr. Silverman, like the other executives, emphasized that American ideas will continue to dominate, with a sprinkling of international shows mixed in. “It’s still Hollywood, not London-wood,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/26/arts/television/26form.html?ref=television