Entertainment bits


Blogs, telly

Everybody who knows me can understand how I'd be silently wailing and gnashing my teeth because I can't go see the Royal Shakespeare Company's instantly-sold-out Hamlet starring David Tennant and Patrick Stewart. For those of you unfamiliar with the story, but quite familiar with the way Facebook and other newsfeeds work: Hamlet - Facebook News Feed Edition.

Courtesy of the Gut Check column / blog at the RiverFront Times: Cake Wrecks - When professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong. Good for half an hour of "Oh my gawd, what were they thinking?"

A lot of you are also aware of my, well... loathing of Hollywood's propensity to grab a brilliant U.K. television show and "Americanize" it. What's especially bad is when they don't complete the job but just re-cast the show, change the location, and clean out the Brit-lish. For every The Office (which you'll notice now looks nothing like its British parent) we have train-wrecks like Viva Laughlin! which not even having a big-name star like Hugh Jackman as producer and in a minor role could save, and was mercifully (for us) put down after the second episode. The locomotive currently under surveillance is Life on Mars. It's the story of a modern-day policeman who, after being accidentally struck by a car, wakes up in 1973. The tag line was "Am I dead, in a coma, or just mad?" The British version ran for two years starting in 2006 -- it was supposed to go for three, but the lead got tired of living far away from his wife and new babies all week during filming -- and its spin-off has just started filming its second season.

The American version has gone through a very, very troubled pregnancy. After the pilot was screened, the entire cast except the lead were replaced, although it is the opinion of many who have seen both U.S. versions that the lead is the problem -- he's an Irish pretty-boy with an expression of stone. Because autumn publicity for the show had already gone out over the airwaves, big names like Harvey Keitel and Gretchen Mol were brought on board in an attempt to save it, and it was moved from L.A. to New York City to make it "grittier." Now, props to Keitel -- he's a hulla actor -- but the part is a mid-level policeman, lead of the team of detectives at one station; he doesn't even run the station. Keitel is 70. The actor in the U.K. role was 42 at the time the first season filmed. If the U.S. show takes off on its own direction -- and lemme tell ya, the pilot is as word-for-word the U.K. version as you can manage post-de-Anglification -- this could be an interesting place to explore: is he fighting retirement? Is he a pain in the ass to his superiors? Did he just never get any higher, or was he busted back down to that spot, or is that the best place for him a la Kirk in the Star Trek movies? But, if they stick to the U.K. plot arc, his age makes no sense at all -- the character was in his normal progression up the promotional ladder.

Oh, and supposedly the ambiguity of the lead's situation will be played up, because unlike U.K. shows, U.S. shows rarely have planned arcs and stop-dates, and the season runs much longer -- a U.K. show will have a season of 8 to 13 episodes. Since the U.K. version was a mere 16 episodes, the U.S. version could quite possibly run through the entire set of scripts in one season, except of course that they can't use the finale at all, because the U.K. version was exceptionally final.

Anyhow, if you want to see some stills from the U.S. pilot (new version), they're here. Who knows, the U.S. (or the critics, anyway) may just decide they like the nostalgia-trip and declare it good. I have a soft spot in my heart for the U.K. original and its spin-off, and won't be watching.



Posted: Wed - September 24, 2008 at 08:39 AM   Home         | | View Technorati reactions

©