TV's Import Business

David Edelstein Looks At The Fall Season's New Shows Road-Tested From Overseas

(CBS)  "The Office" was a comedy hit in England before being transplanted to the U.S., where the American version became a hit in its own right. David Edelstein looks at new shows that were road-tested overseas.

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For decades, America has exported its TV shows overseas, which is why nomadic tribes of sub-Saharan Africa know the zip code of Beverly Hills.

But this season, it's also in the import business - buying up high concepts and series from other countries, recasting them, and making them ours. Or not.

There's nothing wrong with this inherently. American culture can be insular, but we can learn from other countries' ways of framing experience. One of our most momentous shows, "All in the Family," came from Britain's "Till Death Do Us Part." Our Archie was softened from their truly nasty Alf … but it was a breakthrough in a culture where father was assumed to know best.

Some of our biggest shows are imports. "American Idol": Its tackiness was formulated in Britain as "Pop Idol." Now Simon Cowell is, Lord help us, America's arbiter of taste.

"The Office" was Ricky Gervais' breakout, and I think there's something indefinably not-American about its remake. But after four seasons Steve Carrell and company have made those roles their own.

"Ugly Betty" - its premise imported from Columbia - gives American English-language TV a welcome shot of florid Latin American soap, plus satire. And a show with a heroine like this would never have come here if it hadn't been a hit elsewhere.

American TV has enough forensics, so it's great someone brought over Britain's "Life on Mars," where a detective for no clear reason goes back in time to the Seventies, where they don't have computers or fiber analysis or anything! It could work here with actors like Harvey Keitel.

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer transplants "The Eleventh Hour," a middling Brit series with Patrick Stewart as a roving super-scientist solving science mysteries. Now with Rufus Sewell, it skips along the surface, with none of the original's atmosphere. The Brits had Ashley Jensen, attractive but real. We get china doll Marley Shelton. (Our women must be younger, thinner, and leggier.)

That's also true of the Australian sitcom "Kath and Kim": A newlywed struggling with her weight leaves her husband and moves back with her mom who's trying to have her second youth. It's the same template with Molly Shannon and leggy Selma Blair, but at least Blair has an original-American idea: to make Kim less glum than nuttily self-centered like Britney Spears.

The Israeli show "Mythological Ex" (or "The Ex List" here) is a one-joke idea, maybe good for a Kate Hudson movie, about a thirtysomething woman told by a psychic she has already dated her soulmate, so she re-dates the men she has slept with. There are lots. The pilot with (leggy) Elizabeth Reaser is overbaked, but you see the potential - an intensely compressed relationship every week, and all the different ways it can be screwed up.

These shows can work - but only if their re-creators use what's unique in the foreign originals but move them in a new, American direction. Take Fleetwood Mac to heart: "You can go your own way."