Ever since Norman Lear remade the BBC series Till Death Us Do Part into All in the Family, American remakes of British television shows have become part of the American cultural fabric. Indeed, some of the programs currently said to exemplify American tastes and attitudes, from reality programs like American Idol and What Not to Wear to the mock-documentary approach of The Office, are adaptations of successful British shows. Carlen Lavigne and Heather Marcovitch's American Remakes of British Television: Transformations and Mistranslations is a multidisciplinary collection of essays that focuses on questions raised when a foreign show is adapted for the American market. What does it mean to remake a television program? What does the process of 'Americanization' entail? What might the success or failure of a remade series tell us about the differences between American and British producers and audiences? This volume examines British-to-American television remakes from 1971 to the present. The American remakes in this volume do not share a common genre, format, or even level of critical or popular acclaim. What these programs do have in common, however, is the sense that something in the original has been significantly changed in order to make the program appealing or accessible to American audiences. The contributors display a multitude of perspectives in their essays. British-to-American television remakes as a whole are explained in terms of the market forces and international trade that make these productions financially desirable. Sanford and Son is examined in terms of race and class issues. Essays on Life on Mars and Doctor Who stress television's role in shaping collective cultural memories. An essay on Queer as Folk explores the romance genre and also talks about differences in national sexual politics. An examination of The Office discusses how the American remake actually endorses the bureaucracy that the British original satirizes; alternatively, another approach breaks down The Office's bumbling boss figures in terms of contemporary psychological theory. An essay on What Not to Wear discusses how a reality show about everyday fashion conceals the construction of an ideal national subject; a second essay explains the show in terms of each country's discourses surrounding femininity. The success of American Idol is explained by analyzing the role of amateur music in American culture. The issue of translation itself is interrogated by examining specific episodes of Cracker, and also by asking why a successful series in the U.K., Blackpool, was a dismal failure as an American remake. This collection provides a rich and multifaceted overview of approaches to international television studies.

A discussion of a truly international range of television programs, this title covers alternative modes of television such as digital and satellite.

Between Emma Peel and tire Ministry of Silly Walks British television had a significant impact on American popular culture in the 1960s and 1970s. In Something Completely Different, Jeffrey Miller offers the first comprehensive study of British programming on American television, discussing why the American networks imported such series as The Avengers and Monty Python's Flying Circus; how American audiences received these uniquely British shows; and how the shows' success reshaped American television. Miller's lively analysis covers three genres: spy shows, costume dramas, and sketch comedies. In addition to his close readings of the series themselves, Miller considers the networks' packaging of the programs for American viewers and the influences that led to their acceptance, including the American television industry's search for new advertising revenue and the creation of PBS.

Contemporary British Television Crime Drama examines one of the medium’s most popular genres and places it within its historical and industrial context. The television crime drama has proved itself capable of numerous generic reinventions and continues to enjoy some of the highest viewing figures. Crime drama offers audiences stories of right and wrong, moral authority asserted and resisted, and professionals and criminals, doing so in ways that are often highly entertaining, innovative, and thought provoking. In examining the appeal of this highly dynamic genre, this volume explores how it responds not only to changing social debates on crime and policing, but also to processes of hybridization within the television industry itself. Contributors, many of whom are leading figures in UK television studies, analyse popular series such as Broadchurch, Between the Lines, Foyle’s War, Poirot, Prime Suspect, Sherlock and Wallander. Essays examine the main characteristics of television crime drama production, including the nature of trans-Atlantic franchises and literary and transnational adaptations. Adopting a range of feminist, historical, aesthetic and industrial approaches, they offer incisive interrogations that provide readers with a rich understanding of the allure of crime drama to both viewers and commissioners.

This interdisciplinary study examines how state surveillance has preoccupied British and American television series in the twenty years since 9/11. Surveillance and Terror in Post-9/11 British and American Television illuminates how the U.S. and U.K., bound by an historical, cultural, and television partnership, have broadcast numerous programs centred on three state surveillance apparatuses tasked with protecting us from terrorism and criminal activity: the prison, the police, and the national intelligence agency. Drawing from a range of case studies, such as Sherlock, Orange is the New Black and The Night Manager, this book discusses how television allows viewers, writers, and producers to articulate fears about an increased erosion of privacy and civil liberties following 9/11, while simultaneously expressing a desire for a preventative mechanism that can stop such events occurring in the future. However, these concerns and desires are not new; encompassing surveillance narratives both past and present, this book demonstrates how television today builds on earlier narratives about panoptic power to construct our present understanding of government surveillance.

What is it like to make television comedy? How do writers get their ideas made, and how do commissioners and producers decide what to make? How do members of the comedy industry work with large broadcasters and production companies, and what does it mean to be creative – and stay creative? Drawing on interviews with many key writers such as Sam Bain, Paul Doolan, Graham Linehan, David Mitchell, Simon Nye and Sue Teddern, producers including Ash Atalla, Lisa Clark, Michelle Farr, Ali McPhail, Jon Plowman and Adam Tandy, and commissioners, the BBC’s Shane Allen, Channel 4’s Nerys Evans and Sky’s Lucy Lumsden, Creativity in the British Television Comedy Industry explores the creative processes that lead to successful programme-making. With detailed discussion of the processes by which series such as People Just Do Nothing and After Hours came to our screens, this book examines how members of the comedy industry maintain careers, manage failure, develop their craft, and stay creative. Creativity in the British Television Comedy Industry is essential reading for students and researchers with an interest in comedy studies, television production, and the creative/media industries.

Providing a cross-cultural investigation of the current phenomenon of transnational television remakes, and assembling an international team of scholars, this book draws upon ideas from transnational media and cultural studies to offer an understanding of global cultural borrowings and format translation. While recognising the commercial logic of global television formats that animates these remakes, the collection describes the traffic in transnational television remakes not as a one-way process of cultural homogenisation, but rather as an interstitial process through which cultures borrow from and interact with one another. More specifically, the chapters attend to recent debates around the transnational flows of local and global media cultures to focus on questions in the televisual realm, where issues of serialisation and distribution are prevalent. What happens when a series is remade from one national television system to another? How is cultural translation handled across series and seasons of differing length and scope? What are the narrative and dramaturgical proximities and differences between local and other versions? How does the ready availability of original, foreign series shape an audience’s reception of a local remake? How does the rhetoric of ‘Quality TV’ impact on how these remakes are understood and valued? In answering these and other questions, this volume at once acknowledges both the historical antecedents to transnational trade in broadcast culture, and the global explosion in, and cultural significance of, transnational television remakes since the beginning of the twenty-first century. This book was originally published as a special issue of Continuum.

Remakes are pervasive in today’s popular culture, whether they take the form of reboots, “re-imaginings,” or overly familiar sequels. Television remakes have proven popular with producers and networks interested in building on the nostalgic capital of past successes (or giving a second chance to underused properties). Some TV remakes have been critical and commercial hits, and others haven’t made it past the pilot stage; all have provided valuable material ripe for academic analysis. In Remake Television: Reboot, Re-use, Recycle, edited by Carlen Lavigne,contributors from a variety of backgrounds offer multicultural, multidisciplinary perspectives on remake themes in popular television series, from classic cult favorites such as The Avengers (1961–69) and The X-Files (1993–2002) tocurrent hits like Doctor Who (2005–present) and The Walking Dead (2010–present). Chapters examine what constitutes a remake, and what series changes might tell us about changing historical and cultural contexts—or about the medium of television itself.

In 2014, the UK science-fiction television series Black Mirror was released on Netflix worldwide, quickly becoming a hit with US audiences. Like other beloved British imports, this series piqued Americans' interest with hints of dark comedy, clever plotlines, and six-episode seasons that left audiences frantic for more. In Transatlantic Television Drama, volume editors Michele Hilmes, Matt Hills, and Roberta Pearson team up with leading scholars in TV studies and transnational television to look at how serial dramas like Black Mirror captivate US audiences, and what this reveals about the ways Americans and Brits relate to each other on and off the screen. Focusing on production strategies, performance styles, and audience reception, chapters delve into some of the most widely-discussed programs on the transatlantic circuit, from ongoing series like Game of Thrones, Downton Abbey, Orphan Black, and Sherlock, to those with long histories of transnational circulation like Masterpiece and Doctor Who, to others whose transnational success speaks to the process of exchange, adaptation, and cooperation such as Rome, Parade's End, Broadchurch, and Gracepoint. The book's first section investigates the platforms that support British/American exchange, from distribution partnerships and satellite providers to streaming services. The second section concentrates on the shift in meaning across cultural contexts, such as invocations of heritage, genre shifts in adaptation, performance styles, and, in the case of Episodes, actual dramatized depiction of the process of transatlantic television production. In section three, attention turns to contexts of audience reception, ranging from fan conventions and fiction to television criticism, the effects of national branding on audiences, and the role of social media in de- or re-contextualizing fans' response to transnational programs.

As American television continues to garner considerable esteem, rivalling the seventh art in its "cinematic" aesthetics and the complexity of its narratives, one aspect of its development has been relatively unexamined. While film has long acknowledged its tendency to adapt, an ability that contributed to its status as narrative art (capable of translating canonical texts onto the screen), television adaptations have seemingly been relegated to the miniseries or classic serial. From remakes and reboots to transmedia storytelling, loose adaptations or adaptations which last but a single episode, the recycling of pre-existing narrative is a practice that is just as common in television as in film, and this text seeks to rectify that oversight, examining series from M*A*S*H to Game of Thrones, Pride and Prejudice to Castle.