The original BBC version of The Office is hilarious. And now an Americanized version is starting on NBC this Thursday.
I hope the NBC version will be good. Perhaps the BBC thinks it will make more money showing the original on BBC America.
But really, the show is in English. It's set in an office. There's a guy who is the boss who provides unintentional humo[u]r, there's sexually charged interaction between the staff. It's a sitcom, so the humor is mostly self-contained. It's not as if it's political comedy, and they're sitting round cracking jokes about Ken Livingstone and George Galloway.
Nor does it require knowledge of the sweep of English history, as some shows did for best effect.
But I'll watch The Office, and perhaps it will be good. I think the reasons these remakes often fail to have the charm of the original is that the adapters think that all they need to do is make the bare minimum of changes needed to make the show comprehensible to people of bare minimum intelligence. I think they're underestimating their audience's intelligence and ability to read subtitles and listen to British accents.
Posted by robe0419 at March 21, 2005 1:03 PM