The American character-based sitcom set in a small hotel that was successful was Newhart, which ran from 1982-1990. Bob Newhart as Dick Loudon was almost the anti-Basil, with crazy things going on around him, while the only sign that he was fazed was his trademark stammer.
Newhart probably deserves an honorable mention for having drawn some elements from FT without being a remake. It was a great show with a fun ensemble cast. I guess the townsfolk from Vermont were more of a highlight than the guests at the inn. I always think of my parents when I see a clip because they enjoyed it so much.
Newhart has the funniest final episode in the entire history of television. The entire cast were perfect. They replaced Stephanie after the first season. Julia Duffy was perfect. And Tom Poston (was originally going to be Maxwell Smart) nailed the role of George the handyman.
@@zapkvrlet's not forget Peter Scolari. I missed Kirk when he left, but Micheal was a vocabulary and expressional gymnast. And of course Larry, Darryl and Darryl were a cut above. Also, Joanna added a necessary charm. Farty Towels and Newhart were very different animals but I defo think there's more than a hint of 'Turn right at Torquay and you're on the road to Vermont. Still in love with Stephanie, though, oOOoooh.
Fawlty Towers was more of a stage farce than a comedy series. A lot of sticky situations that are tried to get out of, but generally ending up causing something worse. Usually culminating in the main character exiting and everyone else left to argue over who should sort it all out. It could never really be considered to be a true sit-com. It had situation comedy in it, but it was much, much more. The under-breath one liners that Basil would mutter to himself regarding guests, even when in their presence, was testament to that. These US versions seemed to try and play as straight sitcoms, and because of it there's no real build-up in regard to the situations they're in. The one liners are there, but they're more for the audience than a by-product of the frustrations that are mounting. They all fall flat because of this.
I genuinely never thought if it this way before and upon reflection you’re 100% correct. I that’s my favourite part of it all really, everything is played out right in front of the relevant character and the audience, there isn’t any set up behind the scenes, nothing is hidden not that that makes all the jokes obvious, there is so much subtle humour as well that it keeps Fawlty relevant and funny to people in a wide demographic, you come away satisfied regardless of whether you’re older/younger or consider yourself to be highbrow/intelligent/educated.
@@TheChardygirl007 There's been a number of farces, which were primarily stage plays, that have been adapted into films. 'No sex please, we're British', is one such example. As is, 'Don't just lie there, say something.' They all follow the same formula.
I agree. As is well known the show was inspired by a real life hotelier, but Cleese and Booth blew it up to 11. It's not at all realistic, but almost operatic in it's hilarity.
@@davidjames579The funny thing is that apparently his real life guests and even his own daughter said that Basil is actually more likeable than he was!
For an American audience that's never seen the original, it could work. But you'd need more committed actors and direction, and basically just stick to the original scripts.
The one thing that constantly comes up in these comparisons is the fact that American remakes just can't get to grips with writing 'grotesque' people. David Brent, Hyacinth Bucket, Arnold Rimmer, DelBoy Trotter are fundamentally maladjusted people, which American producers and directors just don't want to have as main characters.
The Rimmer mention reminded me how wrong they got Dave Lister. The original (played by Craig Charles) a mix-raced short lazy slob from Liverpool being the central character and last of the human race? The American version (played by Craig Bierko) was more the tall, broad shouldered, square jawed caucasian hero type. Ok so he was still kinda lazy and slobby but not too much cos an american hero couldn't be too flawed. At least back then. :P
@@carn9507 I was going to use (British) Lister as one of the examples but as much as he is a lazy slob he has the most redeeming features in the show. Thinking you are the last human alive probably would change you, and he does show some real feelings in the show. But I totally agree with you on the (USA) Lister; they did cast a 'Hollywood' handsome dude that obviously looked after himself yet expected us to think he was the 'space bum' that Craig Charles was.
Maybe not always. Two very successful American sitcoms remade from British ones come to mind. 'All in the Family' from 'Til Death do us Part', along with 'Three's Company' from 'Man about the House.' (All of these also spawning several sequels). I'd argue that Archie and Edith Bunker were every bit as 'grotesque' as Alf and Else Garnett. In the second spinoff, George and Mildred Roper were ably americanised by the Stanley and Helen Roper characters, keeping much of the grotesquerie of the original pairing, albeit slightly differently. Oddly, though one of the greatest UK comedy series with two really grotesque characters 'Steptoe and Son' ,was remade stateside as the very popular 'Sandford and Son' which was much gentler as a comedy - the characters not really being grotesque at all, but actually quite warm and human.
Is Del Boy grotesque? I always saw him as a relatively sympathetic character, who fell into legally ambiguous activities rather than being deliberately criminal. To get ahead in Thatcher's Britain, you had to be entrepreneurial.
In most British comedies the central character(s) is/are the butt of most of the jokes. In Fawlty Towers we're laughing at Basil's antics as he loses the plot. In most American comedies the central character is the hero, kicking down at others with their superior one-liners. When an American remake tries to copy a British comedy but make the central character a wisecracking hero, it just doesn't work. It's not a 100% rule, but think of any classic British comedy and chances are the central character is also the person we're laughing at the most. Keeping Up Appearances, One Foot in the Grave, Dad's Army, The Office, Steptoe & Son, Hancock's Half Hour, Yes Minister, and on and on.
Most of those shows just wouldn't work without some major retooling, but some could be done successfully. So you could potentially do an American reworking of Yes minister, as long as the Humphrey character was the 'hero' of the show, with his witty observations, or perhaps with Bernard being the plucky underdog, who thwarts some scheme or other, and the minister/senator would have to be the classic stuck up authority figure, in the mold of the college dean in all those 80s comedy movies.
@@roaringviking5693 Quite possibly. I don't recall how it first came to my attention, but once you've seen it you can't un-see it. It explains why I liked Home Improvement, a US comedy where the central character is the butt of most of the jokes. It's a very British quality to be able to tell a joke at your own expense.
Not disagreeing overall but - in Blackadder, from S2 onwards: the central character is the (anti-)hero with superior one-liners. Quintessentially British comedy.
I guess Harvey Korman was arguably the most John Cleese-like American actor of his day, but the whole enterprise was just so wrongheaded. Basil Fawlty is one of those characters who can only ever be played by one actor, I think because John Cleese put so much of himself into it. The other thing is that in those days, American TV networks really pushed for sitcoms to have real drama mixed in and for characters to have "growing moments" for the sake of sending a positive message, which just doesn't work with FT, in which nobody grows or changes; the show centers on someone forever condemned to be himself and never to learn from his mistakes; that's why he's funny. The characters in FT don't really have arcs; they simply are who they are and respond to their absurd world accordingly. Nobody wants to see moments of actual marital drama or emotional realism between Basil and Sybil; that would shatter the comedic illusion. Nobody watched FT wondering if Sybil would finally leave Basil, or if Connie or Manuel would move on with their lives, or if there'd be a tearful finale in which Basil finally shows the tiniest trace of humanity and everyone hugs. In that regard FT had no dramatic tension, it was 100% comedic tension. I don't think an American sitcom centered on unsympathetic main characters till Seinfeld, which had an avowed policy of "no hugging, no learning."
Although it's not really the same thing, I think Curb Your Enthusiasm is a good comparison, of a tone deaf anti-hero and his misadventures, often through misunderstanding people/misrepresenting himself due to his personality. I'd say it's the closest thing to an American Fawlty Towers. Although maybe a bit One Foot In The Grave as well.
Very astute analysis. Cleese’s Basil was annoyed at best, seething at his comedic worst and completely oblivious to these faults as the root of his problems. Yet Cleese took this toxic stew and made him the guy you couldn’t help love. American sitcoms at the time were all about liking the characters so they could never commit to the insane antics of Basil which are the heart of the show. Newhart took the essential premise and made it throughly American with a lovable and put upon innkeeper rather than an irritable loon waiting to pop. M
Listening to his recent befuddlement on Boris Johnson being given a top slot on GBNews channel is the best comedy he's done for years. Harvey and John could not have aspired to that level of fuddery, Cleese has been playing the long game here. Wait until I'm in my 80s then release my inner Basil 😅. Its brilliant that he has nowhere to back down to with his free speech bollocks, pure Fawlty. Any day now I expect he will leave the studio hidden in a large laundry basket.
Betty White in one, Bea Arthur in the next. Never realised two Golden Girls had been leads in Fawlty Tower remake attempts. Then realised Harvey Corman and Bea Arthur were also in the infamously awful Star Wars Holiday Special too. :O
There was a pool of TV actors who you would see all the time on series. They would pop up as one offs in The Love Boat and Fantasy Island, etc. Not their fault the SW Special was so badly written.
I think one reason some of these comedies don’t transfer well, and perhaps never could, is that differences in cultures aren’t adequately taken into account. One reason Basil Fawlty is funny is that he is the antithesis of a British ideal to which he aspires, and his extremity plays against a backdrop in which everyone else comes much closer to being properly reserved than he does. He not only lacks the pedigree to be what he wants to be; he can’t even manage ten straight minutes of stereotypical upper-class or middle-class British reserve. Of course, another reason is that John Cleese is such a unique talent, able to skate effortlessly between trying to act innocent, to dropping acidic one-liners under his breath, to being overtly physically abusive to anyone or anything that can’t fight back, and always because of his frustrations with himself. Ironically, the American sitcom that probably got closest to capturing some of the spirit of Fawlty Towers is Newhart, whose star is about as different from Cleese, on the surface, as can be-although I can just look at either of them, and laugh. A major similarity, though, is that both performers are terrific at portraying, in subtle or broad strokes, characters who are, like so many actual people on their respective home turfs, the antithesis of their country’s pop culture ideals. As the UK values reserve, US pop culture values brashness in the face of rudeness or craziness. In Newhart’s Dick Loudon, we have a guy who is much like Newhart’s earlier Bob Hartley character, in that his temperament and his job circumstances often have him, to hilarious effect, politely downplaying his reactions, humoring people, and acting as if complete insanity is utterly sane. His occasional overt displays of annoyance and anger end up just being brief moments of irritability and impotence. Dick is as powerless over the ignorance, narcissism, and crazy groupthink around him as Basil is over his own considerable limits. Dick and the Newhart show premise also have a lot in common with Green Acres, in which a citified central character who is, in all other respects, a complete realist, can’t seem to escape his own romanticizing of rural life, and can’t seem to leave his three-piece suits on hangers while doing farm chores. A lawyer who’s accustomed to relying on his superior knowledge and reasoning skills, he finds those tools useless in the alternate universe of Hooterville. The Canadian series Mr. D is sometimes very funny because the title character is the opposite of polite Canadian or empty-headed rural Canadian stereotypes, and the opposite of what is expected of him as someone who teaches kids. Instead, he’s forever trying to game systems that simply won’t be gamed to his liking. He’s like a Canadian Ralph Cramden or Sgt Bilko. He’s not mean; he simply cares only about what he wants. US producers aren’t great with absurdity and non sequiturs the way Monty Python and Peter Cook were. Some US shows do terrible characters okay, but the terrible characters are rarely the funniest. They’re often either cartoon-like or too much like people we in the states actually deal with to be funny. In recent years, combining terrible with the surreal has seemed to work, as on Arrested Development and Tina Fey’s shows. As for Laroquette, I imagine he had an additional burden of trying to differentiate his inn-owner character from the terrible Dan Fielding character he had played on Night Court. Every once in a while, an American or Canadian sketch comedy show edges into doing what Python did so well. Off hand, I can think of an old SNL sketch in which Will Forte’s response to every trivial “crisis” was to panic, and repeatedly shout, “Ohh, no!”. The State, years ago, did a sketch in which fast food employees become increasingly verbally and physically abusive toward each other, the exact opposite of the enforced niceness of American service jobs.
Two of the Golden Girls starred in very weak US versions of a classic UK sitcom. Then in the UK we produced an abysmal sitcom called The Brighton Belles which was our version of The Golden Girls - that's tv karma!
I remember as a kid there was a US comedy set in a hotel starring Steve Guttenberg which they said was 'inspired' by Fawlty Towers. I've had a look and the show appears to be 'No Soap, Radio' from 1982, althought the wiki page for it says it was 'inspired' from Monty Python.
I considered mentioning the various shows that were 'inspired' by those series too but there really are quite a lot, I thought it better to stick to the more direct adaptions
So much talent and chemistry in the original would be hard to replicate anywhere. An important point is that Basil *is* the hotel. The character of each represents the other.
I think the key difference with "Snavely" is that Basil Fawlty considers himself a reasonable man. A very reasonable man, who, for some reason, the Gods are torturing with outrageous fortune. He thinks of himself as polite and obliging. He actually *is* somewhat polite, if a bit lacking in patience. It's never his fault, in his mind, when he ends up abusing people and things. You're supposed to be able to sympathise with him, sort of. American sitcoms can't do subtlety like that, they don't do subtlety in their comedy at all. I don't mean Basil is a very subtle character, but the difference is subtle. You can sympathise with him and see where he's coming from, up until he makes his first wrong step.
Fawlty Towers was both a farce, and slapstick. But also a comedy of manners. The snobbery of Basil is what drove him to such ridiculous behaviour. That just doesn’t exist in the yank remake. Maybe if Frasier had opened a boutique hotel…
I had a Scottish professor at art school who would wander the room as we worked on projects, talking about various British comedies He later told me that he used it as a sort of intelligence test for students, sorting us by who got them and who didn't. One day, he mentioned Fawlty Towers, and I said I didn't like it much. He yelled, going on and on about how could anyone not laugh at this, before finally storming out of the room. After 2 or 3 minutes, he came back in and said to me "Yehr not married, are ye? Ye doan get that show until yehr married."
I found your videos recently, and on looking at your channel for more I was surprised to see you only have three. Your videos are great quality and so interesting and I look forward to more. On this one, Bea Arthur seemed the best fit and I could have seen that iteration working if they’d succeeded in making it their own.
Great presentation. It was really interesting to see the comparisons between all three remakes and not just the original. A German remake seems an intriguing concept. Although I never saw anything beyond the cast photo, I remember hearing of a remake of 'Coupling' which I really love. Although they were accused of being a rip-off of friends with the 3 men and 3 women setup. But there was a very different dynamic to the characters.
I haven't watched the remake of Coupling, but I've heard it's just the same show but the jokes are delivered worse, and it's a bit more PG. Least that's what I've heard!
These three remakes, ironically, all have great comedic talent working in them, but they jsut don't seem to have got that essential spark in the writing to make them work that well (certainly not well enough to have been hits). Normally anytime the US has done remakes of UK comedies I hands down prefer our copy to y'all's originals (Three's Company, Sanford & Son, All in the Family, etc even on up to the Office), but Fawlty Towers is such an awesome comedy gem that nothing would've had even a chance by comperison. And I may be wrong, but not only was its acting and writing so perfectly matched that no one even in your neck of the woods would've been able to or be able to again match it, but it has such very British sensibilities that I don't think a US version is possible. Least nota good one. And for it to fit with our sense of humor and settings it woukd end up beaing a complete new show. These three, sadly, didn't realize that in time. I'm also guessing the same is true of that other wonderful show, Are You Being Served. But jot to the same level. Maybe, just maybe, Keeping Up Appearances could be done here. Still would be as charming but it'd at least have a shot at some success.
Manuel feels like Latka in the first two versions and Balki in the third. Good job comparing the three and pointing out the good and the bad for each one!
I rather enjoyed our version of "The Office", even though a few of the characters (Dwight & Kevin in particular) were a tad cartoonish. Okay, maybe more than a tad. But the show's glimpses into office dynamics were often spot on. I can't speak for the British version because, well, I've never worked in a British office. I can only assume that it's as culturally honest as ours tried to be. And therein is justification for at least some of the differences, IMO.
Not directly, but you will find many average Americans enjoy British comedies, but they have never been exposed to them due ti the way US TV network were run. Any comedy or drama needs to be tweaked for it's audience, which is why Three's Company, All in The Family and the US office were a success. Where they just try to copy and past a show never works. Probably means they just got the rights cheaply and decide to do ANY similar program to keep competitors out.
Actually American audiences love British comedies, but they're only available on PBS, BBC America, or BritBox. Historically they've only been accessible on PBS, which is the public owned station.
Another thing that went against the US versions creating enough build-up to the final pay-off was lack of time: most "half hour" sitcoms were actually 22-23minutes long. Losing those 5 or 6 minutes from the ad-free BBC running time was crucial when they were trying to recreate the same plots.
When you commented on shouting I immediately understood, but also simultaneously thought of Frasier Crane. Quite similarly, Frasier himself ends up on a madcap rant because he's lost the plot, but never does the shouting come across as too real. There are sincere heartfelt moments on the series where characters express their pain and feelings, however no one fundamentally changes who they are. Everyone continues in their little quirky realm because that's what makes the chemistry work.
I remember hearing somewhere that the Mel Brooks-produced The Nutt House was a (very loose) adaptation of Fawlty Towers as well - but I'm not inclined to explore it in detail, having seen quite enough of it when it was shown on BBC2...
Thanks for the comprehensive video! Really nice work. I loved the original Fawlty Towers but had only seen the Bea Arthur version, which I gave up on after the first episode.
I would have said the reason Fawlty Towers doesn't work in the US is because it's about class and snobbery. But then along came Frasier which was all about class and snobbery and was a huge hit
I've always felt that Newhart was the closest American kin to Fawlty Towers. What they did right was that they made it their own. Bob never tried to be John Cleese or be a Basil clone, and they understood culture. It never tried to be Fawlty Towers and it worked.
Cheers is rumoured to have been inspired by Fawlty Towers as well, except that they didn't have the budget for a hotel so it was only a bar. Dianne plays the upper class blonde, Coach is the incompetent help and Carla offends the guests.
Diane strikes more as Hyacinth Bucket than Cybil (sorry if that's the wrong spelling) Fawlty. She only wishes she was an upper class blonde and puts on a show to make everyone think she is.
The most enduring and most beloved British comedy characters tend to be people blighted by failure, characters whose dreams never came true, whose lives never turned out quite the way they'd hoped (Tony Hancock, Harold Steptoe, Rigsby, Basil Fawlty, Derek Trotter, Victor Meldrew, David Brent) - and I think the idea of 'celebrating' failure (or finding comedy in it) very much goes against the grain for aspirational, wise-cracking American sitcoms. The obvious exception being the magnificent Ernie Bilko (Phil Silvers, not Steve Martin), of course.
OMG! The german version "Hotel Zum letzten Kliff" with Jochen Busse. John Cleese approved of that remake. They consulted him for the german version. John Cleese even said that they'd done it "superbly"! RTL (the german TV station) only aired the pilot. I'm from germany, a big Fawlty Towers fan and have never heared of that german remake!
I think they would have succeeded if they had the talented comedy writing team behind the American sitcom Seinfeld. Which had a lot of Fawlty Tower like moments and moments which were extremely funny in Seinfeld which are similar to the humour classic British comedy tv series from the 1970s and 1980s, . If Larry David and Seinfeld were behind it they probably would have been able to pull it off.
You know who else… Woody Allen could probably write/direct a remake with the right actors. FT is broader comedy than his usual but I think he’d “get it” where a Hollywood stock screenwriter would not. (And a 40-something Woody might have been a decent Basil, there’s some overlap between Woody’s screen neuroses and Basil’s.)
John Cleese was the magic of the show. The supporting actors were superb, but were just supporting. Cleese did great in everything he did, yet the others are known for nothing else. That speaks to the talent of Cleese, not a reflection on the others because they all worked perfectly in Fawlty Towers. Cleese and Booth married in the first series and divorced between the two, but worked well together and were able to create the 2nd series. These American copies just bombed.. no one could touch his writing because he had no problem making a fool of himself and too many refuse to do that for fear of hurting their reputation.
Well, the closest to that is a fan film some high school kids in the USA made as a remake of holy grail - but that's a lot more endearing since it's just kids having a laugh
A co-worker shared an anecdote about a guy who worked at a car factory in the old country and stole one or two components each day to build himself a free car. When he finally put those parts all together he had somehow made a sewing machine. That's typically the result when Americans fail to transfer a British sitcom into an American "version" without understanding how or why the original worked. Coupling U.S. was an amalgam of all the mistakes you described here. It must have seemed like a simple and sure-fire way to capture the Friends audience. Instead, it was the first of many failed copycats. Loosely, the main idea of a small clutch of young friends living as neighbours is as old as television comedy itself. The successful U.S. conversions of Britcoms like Man About The House (Three's Company) and Steptoe and Son (Sanford and Son) took only the most basic framework or the originals but fashioned entirely different American characters and dialogue to make them work.
Yeah British characters just don't really work as Americans, it just doesn't work. There are genuinely funny American characters in their own right, i.e Seinfeld, but trying to take a funny British character and making him funny in America just isn't funny. Its a completely different place with different people who think and interact so differently, so it comes over as so fake as to not be even remotely funny, just fake af.
@@johnba291972 A British writer-producer had a semi-biographical sitcom called *Joking Apart* for two seasons/series. It used the typical *Seinfeld* stand-up bit at the end (and sometimes at the start) to tag the situational subject of each episode. Like Seinfeld, it was meant to be a comic playing a semi-fictional version of his life with his former GF and a neighbour pal interacting in goofy sitcom ways. You'd struggle to see it as a London version of Seinfeld. None of the characters were like their nominal NYC sitcom personas. Also, the scripts were not based on Seinfeld episode ideas. Although this has been strictly denied, you'd be forgiven for seeing the show *Coupling* as a British version of *Friends.* The similarities are more in the skeletons than in the fleshing-out of the different shows. When NBC tried to do *Coupling-U.S.* by copying the English sitcom scripts as a Friends time-slot replacement, it failed.
The humour in Man About The House was contemporary, or at least the high concept was; the shock!horror! of a single man sharing a flat with two single women. There’s nothing remotely controversial, surprising or daring about that today (unless, say, it’s set in Iran).
The main thing I notice is the Americans are just jumping from one-liner to one-liner. "My, line is done, now it's your turn." In the original, there was a life to the characters between the lines, as it were. The actors stayed in the bit, in the overall scene. There was a hotel being run at all times. The US versions just go from bit to bit, and the overall setting is just another background for discrete jokes.
Its sad because they had the abbott/costello "cross-talk" style in America, but seem to miss it when it is done elsewhere. Or is it actually a lost art in the 'states?
It's a fascinating story, if you hear how the British writers were involved, the Americans interpretation of the show, and then the British writers not being involved. It's a perfect example of why so many of these US remakes don't work.
This is a great idea for a YT channel. Looking forward to more. I am kinda suprised that you dont show a bit of the origonal British series as a comparison
Spot-on analysis on what made these American remakes (and most remakes in general) fail. Though I never knew both Betty White and Bea Arthur were in Fawlty Tower remakes.... so fascinating! Great channel... as a die-hard TV geek, I just subscribed!!!!
Wow! Another great video! I had watched videos on these before, but I hadn't found one that discusses all 3. I remember seeing in an interview that Bea Arthur thought the main reason Amanda's failed was because she didn't have a man playing a male Sybil for her to spar with. And I definitely agree. John Cleese seems to think that it was because it was a woman full stop!
18:14 I agree. That scene is far too dramatic. If you'd not told me, I probably wouldn't have guessed this was a rippoff. John Cleese has a great way of hiding his frustration. Thinking one thing but saying another. I'm not much into American sitcoms, but I do like original comedys. My girlfriend introduced me to Rules Of Engagement.. witch is quite good. And she showed me Phoneshop... so funny bruv. (plonkers) Oh yeah. Guys talking about Red Dwarf in the comments... Thanks for the memories ✌
John Cleese: So, how's everything going? Producer of Amanda's: Doing great! We're going to have a great show! We just made one minor change. Cleese: What was that? Producer: Um, we took out Basil. Cleese: Wut?! I saw the Snavely pilot on UA-cam, and it's sad that Betty White and Harvey Korman didn't seem to have much chemistry together. I wonder how it might have worked if it had gone to series. The main problem with Amanda's is the fact that Bea Arthur was pretty much Sybil and Basil combined, although she seemed to me more Sybil than Basil - except for Amanda having Basil's tendency to jump to conclusions. Then, they tried to make us sympathize with her. Which is the problem with American versions of British shows with a ... shall we say, less than lovable character: we try to *make* the characters lovable - a tactic that fails miserably every time. Basil Fawlty was an unregenerate tyrant whom people loved anyway. Amanda's too quickly showed us Amanda's softer side by giving her adversaries who were nastier than she was. That didn't work simply because none of the characters can stand up to Bea Arthur without bastardizing her, which is why they dumped the Fawlty character in the first place. And they made the same mistake with Payne. John Larroquette could have made the perfect American Basil Fawlty -- except the producers wouldn't let him. Yet again, they softened the character because they thought American audiences would never warm up to a totally reprehensible character ... like Basil Fawlty. Interestingly, John Cleese approved of THIS version and verbally agreed to a recurring role should Payne be renewed for a second season. And, of course, it wasn't. The closest thing we had to that type of characterization was Buffalo Bill with Dabney Coleman, who specialized in those types of reprehensible characters. But we just didn't get it at the time, and Buffalo Bill died a quick death. Then, they tried again with The Slap Maxwell Story, and, yes, the network ruined it by making the character sympathetic. Then, there was Drexel's Class, which wasn't all that funny IMO, and Madman of the People, which was okay but made the same mistake as ever by trying to sympathize the character far too quickly. And that didn't work any better than it ever does. And THAT is why the American AbFab attempts never made it to series. One would have starred Kristen Johnson (3rd Rock) as Patsy, and the other would have starred Carrie Fisher, though I'm not sure if she would have played Patsy or Eddy. Either one might have made it work, and I actually wish I lived in an alternate universe where Carrie Freaking Fisher played in American AbFab. That would have been AWESOME!! But really, American television should stay far away from Britcoms. We do that no better with that than we do kaiju.
Ab Fab from the author of Postcards From The Edge sounds ideal. I imagine Carrie would have had some writing involvement, and she had the right temperament and humour to do this. Not sentimental at all.
I remember seeing Amanada's when it came out. They made the Manuel character French-Canadian and said "He's from Toronto" instead of "He's from Barcelona." I've lived in or around Toronto my entire life. The French-Canadian community is tiny and they all speak English. You wouldn't get very far in Toronto if you couldn't speak English.
I read someone's comment recently that French-Canadian Director Denis Villeneuve probably didn't get a joke in English because of the Language Barrier. As I responded, he's French-Canadian, not French!
I think Bea Arthur comes across as just angry when she’s being sarcastic. John Cleese being sarcastic in Fawlty would do it with a smile or in the form of a question. So it was like he was still being nice to the guest despite insulting them. Maybe the only person who could have come close to possibly being an American Basil was John Ritter. He had physical comedic talents and occasionally was sarcastic in Threes Company.
From the clips shown i actually felt like payne looked the best, then snavely and finally amandas. The payne clips got a laugh out of me, i know its very heavily based on fawlty towers but i actually like the fact the comedy style was totally different, it looks more like a typical american sitcom. Snavely felt like a poor imitation of fawlty, trying to be a direct copy but failing. Amandas just didnt seem funny in the slightest and that tonal shift you showed was just bizzare! Ive never been a huge fan of fawlty towers, its one of those shows that seems to be almost universally adored but none of it really resonated with me. I like a lot from the same time period but i think i prefer more understated comedy. Another really interesting video :)
When I first saw Amanda's I did not know that it was a 're-make' of Fawlty Towers, but by the first commercial I kept telling my friend--who was watching with me, you know, back when friends were close enough that they spent time together without one of them being on the phone?--this is a rip off of that PBS show Fawlty Towers. Mark, my friend, actually came over to watch Fawlty with me the next week and after doing so, we rejected Amanda's and never went back to her hotel by the sea. I did find this informative in that it showed me that Betty and Harvey worked together before going on to success in Mama's Family, and Betty worked on a Fawlty 'remake' and so did Bea Arthur before they worked together in Golden Girls.
Check “Over the top” loose adaptation with Tim curry and Steve Carell Also, Newhart is Fawlty Towers through an American Comedic perspective. They are very different in approach but similar premises.
I don’t know why but in a lot of these American remakes they take the same joke but over explain them until they become unfunny. It’s like they think they need to explain why it’s funny but it takes all the humour out of it. Like the terrible chief joke, after it subverted the expectation it should have ended but they just make it all worse!
When they're not explaining the joke, they're overacting and putting 'comedy face' on. It's like American T.V thinks Americans are too stupid to know what a joke is, unless it's made obvious they're not being serious.
American television executives are terrified someone won't get a joke and change shows, so writers are forced to explain everything. "Night Court" had a scene where Roz took too much insulin for her diabetes and was delirious. Dan (John Laroquette) realized she thought she was a child and he replied to her as if he were her dad. It was a tense, moving scene. Right in the middle, they had Christine say that he was pretending to be her father. It was jarring and spoiled the scene for me.
@@alfsmith4936 Unfortunately, a lot of Americans will and do need expllanations for any comedy that isn't slapstick where someone gets hurt. I'm America, BTW.
I think one of the reasons they don't work that well is because the original Fawlty Towers was based on John Cleese and Connie Booths, observations of these types of Hotels it's why it was 2 series because they had said what they wanted to say. Such as Manuel is Spanish because Spain was a popular place for cheap hotel managers to get staff from at the time, that's what made it funny and everything fit and make sense. I.e. why Bazil still employs him. Whereas Albanian refugee for example is just odd, I don't think that holds any relevance to the time and even less now.
oh no! ... so I get that they thought they could replace John Cleese, an easy mistake to make, BUT you cannot replace Andrew Sachs... it's madness to even try. It's one of the hardest roles to play and I suspect only Andrew Sachs could actually pull it off. Obviously the same goes for John Cleese
The moment that I saw Chris Morris in season 1 of the IT Crowd is the moment I knew there was a man that could actually maybe pull off a good Basil Fawlty.
thank you for that. you are the first to agree with me. i'm in my 50's and my family and I watched them all so many times we wore out the recorded episodes VHS tape.@@cinewhirl
You made a 26 minute video, yet missed the most fundamental reason why any remake, even a better-written, better-acted, more faithful American adaptation would fail. "Fawlty Towers" is utterly carried by the character of Basil Fawlty. Yes, the other roles are funny, but it would still be a great show with different actors, or even those roles removed entirely. And Basil Fawlty is a quintessentially English character. He simply doesn't work as an American, or for that matter, any other race. It's not that Fawlty is just an arrogant jerk. It's that he mixes this with a high-class snobbery, adherence to manners and decorum that is so distinctly English. And which makes his inevitable crack-ups and descent into delirious madness so hilarious, since it's such a contrast. Fawlty, if he weren't so incompetent, could be the head butler for a duke. And what is the race that we most closely associate with being a butler, especially with high manners and a stiff upper lip? The English, of course. None of the humor and uniqueness of the character works or even makes sense if he is American. You have to come up with an entirely different character, which in turn would be a different show entirely.
Watching this catalogue of abysmal copies got me wondering if a UK production house had ever remade anything from the US. I have a feeling is just one way, the US production houses looking to "Americanise" a UK product.
Thanks for this analysis. Unquestionably, a masterpiece that in the great British tradition kept true to the art form rather than beating a show premise to death. I remember seeing Fawlty Towers on PBS here in the States circa 1981 perhaps, and adored it from the beginning. It is the tightest show ever written, in my perspective. No extraneous dialogue. I think I tried to stomach Amanda's Place, but I was not a fan of Bea Arthur's (at the time at least), and she just came across as an old battle-axe. I did try to give "Payne" a try with very low expectations, and it was patiently AWFUL. I never liked John Larroquette, and I thought the names were just stupid puns. "Royal Payne"???? Come on. And I seem to remember the Connie Booth character had some weird hippie name like "Breeze" or similar. Basically, it was what Basil Fawlty goes on and on about to the Hamiltons in "Waldorf Salad" when discussing Harold Robbins. "Really the most awful American....well, transatlantic tripe. Sort of pornographic Muzak...." That being said, casting Harvey Korman as Basil Fawlty should have fit perfectly. He really can capture that nastiness and aggressive bully part as well as that pathetic obsequiousness so well. I'll need to find "Snavely" and see what I think. I know it can't compare to Fawlty Towers, but the original was essentially John Cleese and Connie Booth's other child, and a labor of love. The remakes were just attempts at cash-generating machines at the US networks. In these pre-Jerry Seinfeld days, maybe except for Bob Newhart's two successful shows in the 70s and 80s, there really wasn't much emphasis on the artist's creativity. EDIT: I started to watch the Snavely pilot, and I'd say it suffers from the directing. I've seen Harvey Korman in other roles where he could have played the Basil Fawlty character to a "T". Here, he seems to be playing the character as an effeminate man; he could have played it much more aggressively like Cleese. Another problem is networks' attempts for mass appeal. Unfortunately, lots of US network TV at the time seemed unable to use comic subtlty (not all, and again, I think Bob Newhart). The show just comes across as insulting the audience's intelligence, punctuated by the laugh track which essentially tells the audience, "the joke is here; laugh".
There's no comparison to Cleese. Yes, I'm a huge fan of Bea Arthur and Harvey Korman but their shows just didn't have "it" and Cleese's show did and remains a classic today.
US people would have rejected the betty white/corman series, its an exact copy of the Brit version that was already being shown on PBS. Sanford and Son had some differences from Steptoe and Son and was a success. All in the Family was different then Till Death Do Us Part and was a success, I'm sure there are other examples (The Office). I wonder how many, if any, American sitcoms were copied across the pond.
It's funny that Amanda's was cancelled and considered a failure shooting 13 episodes and Fawlty Towers only shot 12 episodes and is loved to this day. I have it on DVD. I'd get it on Blu Ray but here in America I don't believe thats possible. What I remember about Pain, which I thought was called Royal Pains, is that the set was reversed and that the Manuel character was just not funny. Not having a funny Manuel character really hurt the show from what I remember watching. I remember Royal's car going over the edge of a cliff and John Larroruette saying "The duck!" worried about the dinner going over the edge in the car. He tried to play the part being as stressed as John Cleese playing the part Basil on the verge of having a heart attack most of the time. But I think that award goes to John Cleese. Interesting note. The part of Murphy Brown on television was written for JoBeth Williams, a great role for any actess. But JoBeth wanted to keep going with her career on the big screen and turned it down. The part then went to Candice Bergin. JoBeth's big screen career seemed to disappear. Then she took the role in Pain. She probably should've gone with Murphy Brown. But Candice nailed the part.
Royal Pains was a sitcom in the US about a doctor who gets in trouble after an important patient dies, so he has to move to the Hamptons and become a concierge doctor to rich people.
British and American comedy are just far too different. British comedy tends to be darker and sarcastic whereas American humour is so theatrical and slapstick.
Actually Cheers was going to be a loose remake of Faulty Towers with Bill Cosby in the Basil role. But when the writers saw that all there best jokes took place in the bar of the hotel, they scrapped the hotel idea altogether and made the entire series about a bar.
Surely the cheapest and best solution would have been to just SHOW FAWLTY TOWERS and let the audience find it. Or are U.S. Americans too stuck in their own cultural tar pit to manage that? Is that a silly question...? 🤔
So weird that they made that last one so “nice”. Casting Larroquette makes sense, given he spend years playing a mostly unrepentant jerk that everyone loved on Night Court. He would’ve been perfect for a meaner, edgier show like FT.
You just can't successfully copy a show when the crux of the humor is the personal talent of star. You need a show where the humor comes the situation, you just can't 'script' Basil.
As an American and lifelong Fawlty Towers fan, my only question is: why? FT is quintessentially English, that's the source of its humor (or humour, rather), leave it alone. It was also a product of its time and of a very particular group of highly talented people, so even a British remake would be doomed to fail.
Apart from the fact that English humour doesn't really translate to American humour because they don't have expreience with similar characters in real life that the English do, Fawlty Towers was blessed with the perfect cast, and that's not anyone's fawlt. The Americans' only fawlt was attempting to re-create something which not only wouldn't travel well across the Atlantic, but which was already perfect.
It's surprising how many US TV comedies of the time turned into dramas. I think it's something to do with christian influence and them trying to appeal to the larger christian audience at the time, as well as a lot of wealth people being religiously "touched". Harvey Korman stole the show in Blazing Saddles, Bea Arthur was just being Bea Arthur, and John Larroquette was great in the show where he was a reformed alcoholic managing a bus station, so I'm not sure he had an interest in watering down the remake. I suspect it's a public TV thing, as the cable channels could be a bit more risque.
These remakes should have got Connie Booth involved. As she is co writer of Fawlty Towers and American so would have a better idea of what would work in the US.
The American character-based sitcom set in a small hotel that was successful was Newhart, which ran from 1982-1990. Bob Newhart as Dick Loudon was almost the anti-Basil, with crazy things going on around him, while the only sign that he was fazed was his trademark stammer.
Newhart probably deserves an honorable mention for having drawn some elements from FT without being a remake. It was a great show with a fun ensemble cast. I guess the townsfolk from Vermont were more of a highlight than the guests at the inn. I always think of my parents when I see a clip because they enjoyed it so much.
absolutely - i thought of that, too. each character was so well conceived. and Bob Newhart is also irreplaceable! 😊
Newhart has the funniest final episode in the entire history of television. The entire cast were perfect. They replaced Stephanie after the first season. Julia Duffy was perfect. And Tom Poston (was originally going to be Maxwell Smart) nailed the role of George the handyman.
@@zapkvrlet's not forget Peter Scolari. I missed Kirk when he left, but Micheal was a vocabulary and expressional gymnast. And of course Larry, Darryl and Darryl were a cut above. Also, Joanna added a necessary charm.
Farty Towels and Newhart were very different animals but I defo think there's more than a hint of 'Turn right at Torquay and you're on the road to Vermont.
Still in love with Stephanie, though, oOOoooh.
@@martinfisher3883also Tom Poston as George
If you can't get something as simple as the main character right, these remakes will always fail.
Fawlty Towers was more of a stage farce than a comedy series. A lot of sticky situations that are tried to get out of, but generally ending up causing something worse. Usually culminating in the main character exiting and everyone else left to argue over who should sort it all out. It could never really be considered to be a true sit-com. It had situation comedy in it, but it was much, much more. The under-breath one liners that Basil would mutter to himself regarding guests, even when in their presence, was testament to that. These US versions seemed to try and play as straight sitcoms, and because of it there's no real build-up in regard to the situations they're in. The one liners are there, but they're more for the audience than a by-product of the frustrations that are mounting. They all fall flat because of this.
Your opening sentence is right on the money 👍🏾
I genuinely never thought if it this way before and upon reflection you’re 100% correct. I that’s my favourite part of it all really, everything is played out right in front of the relevant character and the audience, there isn’t any set up behind the scenes, nothing is hidden not that that makes all the jokes obvious, there is so much subtle humour as well that it keeps Fawlty relevant and funny to people in a wide demographic, you come away satisfied regardless of whether you’re older/younger or consider yourself to be highbrow/intelligent/educated.
@@TheChardygirl007 There's been a number of farces, which were primarily stage plays, that have been adapted into films. 'No sex please, we're British', is one such example. As is, 'Don't just lie there, say something.' They all follow the same formula.
I agree. As is well known the show was inspired by a real life hotelier, but Cleese and Booth blew it up to 11. It's not at all realistic, but almost operatic in it's hilarity.
@@davidjames579The funny thing is that apparently his real life guests and even his own daughter said that Basil is actually more likeable than he was!
Fawlty Towers is a unique creation. It cannot be repeated.
For an American audience that's never seen the original, it could work. But you'd need more committed actors and direction, and basically just stick to the original scripts.
New FT written by and starting Cleese and his daughter incoming.
Why not watch the original...it´s basically in the same language😂
The one thing that constantly comes up in these comparisons is the fact that American remakes just can't get to grips with writing 'grotesque' people. David Brent, Hyacinth Bucket, Arnold Rimmer, DelBoy Trotter are fundamentally maladjusted people, which American producers and directors just don't want to have as main characters.
The Rimmer mention reminded me how wrong they got Dave Lister. The original (played by Craig Charles) a mix-raced short lazy slob from Liverpool being the central character and last of the human race? The American version (played by Craig Bierko) was more the tall, broad shouldered, square jawed caucasian hero type. Ok so he was still kinda lazy and slobby but not too much cos an american hero couldn't be too flawed. At least back then. :P
@@carn9507 I was going to use (British) Lister as one of the examples but as much as he is a lazy slob he has the most redeeming features in the show. Thinking you are the last human alive probably would change you, and he does show some real feelings in the show.
But I totally agree with you on the (USA) Lister; they did cast a 'Hollywood' handsome dude that obviously looked after himself yet expected us to think he was the 'space bum' that Craig Charles was.
Maybe not always. Two very successful American sitcoms remade from British ones come to mind. 'All in the Family' from 'Til Death do us Part', along with 'Three's Company' from 'Man about the House.' (All of these also spawning several sequels). I'd argue that Archie and Edith Bunker were every bit as 'grotesque' as Alf and Else Garnett. In the second spinoff, George and Mildred Roper were ably americanised by the Stanley and Helen Roper characters, keeping much of the grotesquerie of the original pairing, albeit slightly differently.
Oddly, though one of the greatest UK comedy series with two really grotesque characters 'Steptoe and Son' ,was remade stateside as the very popular 'Sandford and Son' which was much gentler as a comedy - the characters not really being grotesque at all, but actually quite warm and human.
Is Del Boy grotesque? I always saw him as a relatively sympathetic character, who fell into legally ambiguous activities rather than being deliberately criminal. To get ahead in Thatcher's Britain, you had to be entrepreneurial.
@@frgleeHes company was totally shit
In most British comedies the central character(s) is/are the butt of most of the jokes. In Fawlty Towers we're laughing at Basil's antics as he loses the plot.
In most American comedies the central character is the hero, kicking down at others with their superior one-liners. When an American remake tries to copy a British comedy but make the central character a wisecracking hero, it just doesn't work.
It's not a 100% rule, but think of any classic British comedy and chances are the central character is also the person we're laughing at the most. Keeping Up Appearances, One Foot in the Grave, Dad's Army, The Office, Steptoe & Son, Hancock's Half Hour, Yes Minister, and on and on.
Most of those shows just wouldn't work without some major retooling, but some could be done successfully.
So you could potentially do an American reworking of Yes minister, as long as the Humphrey character was the 'hero' of the show, with his witty observations, or perhaps with Bernard being the plucky underdog, who thwarts some scheme or other, and the minister/senator would have to be the classic stuck up authority figure, in the mold of the college dean in all those 80s comedy movies.
You got this from Stephen Fry, didn't you?
@@roaringviking5693 Quite possibly. I don't recall how it first came to my attention, but once you've seen it you can't un-see it.
It explains why I liked Home Improvement, a US comedy where the central character is the butt of most of the jokes. It's a very British quality to be able to tell a joke at your own expense.
Not disagreeing overall but - in Blackadder, from S2 onwards: the central character is the (anti-)hero with superior one-liners. Quintessentially British comedy.
@@madenglishman3417but never works out for him despite all his scheming
I guess Harvey Korman was arguably the most John Cleese-like American actor of his day, but the whole enterprise was just so wrongheaded. Basil Fawlty is one of those characters who can only ever be played by one actor, I think because John Cleese put so much of himself into it. The other thing is that in those days, American TV networks really pushed for sitcoms to have real drama mixed in and for characters to have "growing moments" for the sake of sending a positive message, which just doesn't work with FT, in which nobody grows or changes; the show centers on someone forever condemned to be himself and never to learn from his mistakes; that's why he's funny. The characters in FT don't really have arcs; they simply are who they are and respond to their absurd world accordingly. Nobody wants to see moments of actual marital drama or emotional realism between Basil and Sybil; that would shatter the comedic illusion. Nobody watched FT wondering if Sybil would finally leave Basil, or if Connie or Manuel would move on with their lives, or if there'd be a tearful finale in which Basil finally shows the tiniest trace of humanity and everyone hugs. In that regard FT had no dramatic tension, it was 100% comedic tension. I don't think an American sitcom centered on unsympathetic main characters till Seinfeld, which had an avowed policy of "no hugging, no learning."
Although it's not really the same thing, I think Curb Your Enthusiasm is a good comparison, of a tone deaf anti-hero and his misadventures, often through misunderstanding people/misrepresenting himself due to his personality. I'd say it's the closest thing to an American Fawlty Towers. Although maybe a bit One Foot In The Grave as well.
Very astute analysis. Cleese’s Basil was annoyed at best, seething at his comedic worst and completely oblivious to these faults as the root of his problems. Yet Cleese took this toxic stew and made him the guy you couldn’t help love. American sitcoms at the time were all about liking the characters so they could never commit to the insane antics of Basil which are the heart of the show. Newhart took the essential premise and made it throughly American with a lovable and put upon innkeeper rather than an irritable loon waiting to pop. M
Listening to his recent befuddlement on Boris Johnson being given a top slot on GBNews channel is the best comedy he's done for years. Harvey and John could not have aspired to that level of fuddery, Cleese has been playing the long game here. Wait until I'm in my 80s then release my inner Basil 😅. Its brilliant that he has nowhere to back down to with his free speech bollocks, pure Fawlty. Any day now I expect he will leave the studio hidden in a large laundry basket.
Betty White in one, Bea Arthur in the next. Never realised two Golden Girls had been leads in Fawlty Tower remake attempts. Then realised Harvey Corman and Bea Arthur were also in the infamously awful Star Wars Holiday Special too. :O
There was a pool of TV actors who you would see all the time on series. They would pop up as one offs in The Love Boat and Fantasy Island, etc.
Not their fault the SW Special was so badly written.
SW HS was the same year. I feel sorry for them.
I think one reason some of these comedies don’t transfer well, and perhaps never could, is that differences in cultures aren’t adequately taken into account.
One reason Basil Fawlty is funny is that he is the antithesis of a British ideal to which he aspires, and his extremity plays against a backdrop in which everyone else comes much closer to being properly reserved than he does. He not only lacks the pedigree to be what he wants to be; he can’t even manage ten straight minutes of stereotypical upper-class or middle-class British reserve. Of course, another reason is that John Cleese is such a unique talent, able to skate effortlessly between trying to act innocent, to dropping acidic one-liners under his breath, to being overtly physically abusive to anyone or anything that can’t fight back, and always because of his frustrations with himself.
Ironically, the American sitcom that probably got closest to capturing some of the spirit of Fawlty Towers is Newhart, whose star is about as different from Cleese, on the surface, as can be-although I can just look at either of them, and laugh. A major similarity, though, is that both performers are terrific at portraying, in subtle or broad strokes, characters who are, like so many actual people on their respective home turfs, the antithesis of their country’s pop culture ideals.
As the UK values reserve, US pop culture values brashness in the face of rudeness or craziness. In Newhart’s Dick Loudon, we have a guy who is much like Newhart’s earlier Bob Hartley character, in that his temperament and his job circumstances often have him, to hilarious effect, politely downplaying his reactions, humoring people, and acting as if complete insanity is utterly sane. His occasional overt displays of annoyance and anger end up just being brief moments of irritability and impotence. Dick is as powerless over the ignorance, narcissism, and crazy groupthink around him as Basil is over his own considerable limits.
Dick and the Newhart show premise also have a lot in common with Green Acres, in which a citified central character who is, in all other respects, a complete realist, can’t seem to escape his own romanticizing of rural life, and can’t seem to leave his three-piece suits on hangers while doing farm chores. A lawyer who’s accustomed to relying on his superior knowledge and reasoning skills, he finds those tools useless in the alternate universe of Hooterville.
The Canadian series Mr. D is sometimes very funny because the title character is the opposite of polite Canadian or empty-headed rural Canadian stereotypes, and the opposite of what is expected of him as someone who teaches kids. Instead, he’s forever trying to game systems that simply won’t be gamed to his liking. He’s like a Canadian Ralph Cramden or Sgt Bilko. He’s not mean; he simply cares only about what he wants.
US producers aren’t great with absurdity and non sequiturs the way Monty Python and Peter Cook were. Some US shows do terrible characters okay, but the terrible characters are rarely the funniest. They’re often either cartoon-like or too much like people we in the states actually deal with to be funny. In recent years, combining terrible with the surreal has seemed to work, as on Arrested Development and Tina Fey’s shows. As for Laroquette, I imagine he had an additional burden of trying to differentiate his inn-owner character from the terrible Dan Fielding character he had played on Night Court.
Every once in a while, an American or Canadian sketch comedy show edges into doing what Python did so well. Off hand, I can think of an old SNL sketch in which Will Forte’s response to every trivial “crisis” was to panic, and repeatedly shout, “Ohh, no!”. The State, years ago, did a sketch in which fast food employees become increasingly verbally and physically abusive toward each other, the exact opposite of the enforced niceness of American service jobs.
Woah, that was one heck of a comment. Bravo.
Very interesting!
@@cinewhirl Please forgive the length. I guess it’s obvious I’ve given this a lot of thought, over the years.
This is a really insightful response, very nice.
Two of the Golden Girls starred in very weak US versions of a classic UK sitcom. Then in the UK we produced an abysmal sitcom called The Brighton Belles which was our version of The Golden Girls - that's tv karma!
Many series over the years have gone both ways - a few successful adaptations, but they were adapted, not cloned.
I remember as a kid there was a US comedy set in a hotel starring Steve Guttenberg which they said was 'inspired' by Fawlty Towers. I've had a look and the show appears to be 'No Soap, Radio' from 1982, althought the wiki page for it says it was 'inspired' from Monty Python.
I considered mentioning the various shows that were 'inspired' by those series too but there really are quite a lot, I thought it better to stick to the more direct adaptions
Its like Americans know that these shows are funny, but in trying to recreate them they show that they had no idea WHY they were funny.
So much talent and chemistry in the original would be hard to replicate anywhere. An important point is that Basil *is* the hotel. The character of each represents the other.
I think the key difference with "Snavely" is that Basil Fawlty considers himself a reasonable man. A very reasonable man, who, for some reason, the Gods are torturing with outrageous fortune. He thinks of himself as polite and obliging. He actually *is* somewhat polite, if a bit lacking in patience. It's never his fault, in his mind, when he ends up abusing people and things. You're supposed to be able to sympathise with him, sort of. American sitcoms can't do subtlety like that, they don't do subtlety in their comedy at all.
I don't mean Basil is a very subtle character, but the difference is subtle. You can sympathise with him and see where he's coming from, up until he makes his first wrong step.
At the very least you can follow the logic, tortured though it may be, that leads Basil to the absolutely awful decisions he makes.
Fawlty Towers was both a farce, and slapstick.
But also a comedy of manners. The snobbery of Basil is what drove him to such ridiculous behaviour. That just doesn’t exist in the yank remake.
Maybe if Frasier had opened a boutique hotel…
I had a Scottish professor at art school who would wander the room as we worked on projects, talking about various British comedies He later told me that he used it as a sort of intelligence test for students, sorting us by who got them and who didn't. One day, he mentioned Fawlty Towers, and I said I didn't like it much. He yelled, going on and on about how could anyone not laugh at this, before finally storming out of the room.
After 2 or 3 minutes, he came back in and said to me "Yehr not married, are ye? Ye doan get that show until yehr married."
He turned into Basil Fawlty.
r/thathappened
I grew up on that show and basically know the whole script. I'm still not married and never will be.
was your scottish professor also from the 1630's, via Kingston, Jamaica? ;)
What was the point of this story?
I found your videos recently, and on looking at your channel for more I was surprised to see you only have three. Your videos are great quality and so interesting and I look forward to more. On this one, Bea Arthur seemed the best fit and I could have seen that iteration working if they’d succeeded in making it their own.
Thank you, glad you liked them!
Great presentation. It was really interesting to see the comparisons between all three remakes and not just the original. A German remake seems an intriguing concept. Although I never saw anything beyond the cast photo, I remember hearing of a remake of 'Coupling' which I really love. Although they were accused of being a rip-off of friends with the 3 men and 3 women setup. But there was a very different dynamic to the characters.
I haven't watched the remake of Coupling, but I've heard it's just the same show but the jokes are delivered worse, and it's a bit more PG. Least that's what I've heard!
If there was a very different dynamic it wasn't a copy of friends. That's just complaining for the sake of it.
It was just reaction that some people had without watching it, just because it's 3 men and 3 women.@@davidrogan1292
I wonder how a German remake would handle ‘don’t mention the war’ 😂
These three remakes, ironically, all have great comedic talent working in them, but they jsut don't seem to have got that essential spark in the writing to make them work that well (certainly not well enough to have been hits). Normally anytime the US has done remakes of UK comedies I hands down prefer our copy to y'all's originals (Three's Company, Sanford & Son, All in the Family, etc even on up to the Office), but Fawlty Towers is such an awesome comedy gem that nothing would've had even a chance by comperison. And I may be wrong, but not only was its acting and writing so perfectly matched that no one even in your neck of the woods would've been able to or be able to again match it, but it has such very British sensibilities that I don't think a US version is possible. Least nota good one. And for it to fit with our sense of humor and settings it woukd end up beaing a complete new show. These three, sadly, didn't realize that in time. I'm also guessing the same is true of that other wonderful show, Are You Being Served. But jot to the same level. Maybe, just maybe, Keeping Up Appearances could be done here. Still would be as charming but it'd at least have a shot at some success.
Really enjoying your remake analyses ... good stuff. Please keep making them :)
I will, thank you!
Manuel feels like Latka in the first two versions and Balki in the third. Good job comparing the three and pointing out the good and the bad for each one!
British comedies don't transfer over to American, or pretty much any other country, that well due to the major differences in audience perception.
All in the Family was just as funny as Till Death Us Do Part, and Sanford and Son was a very successful US version of Steptoe and Son.
I rather enjoyed our version of "The Office", even though a few of the characters (Dwight & Kevin in particular) were a tad cartoonish. Okay, maybe more than a tad. But the show's glimpses into office dynamics were often spot on. I can't speak for the British version because, well, I've never worked in a British office. I can only assume that it's as culturally honest as ours tried to be. And therein is justification for at least some of the differences, IMO.
Not directly, but you will find many average Americans enjoy British comedies, but they have never been exposed to them due ti the way US TV network were run.
Any comedy or drama needs to be tweaked for it's audience, which is why Three's Company, All in The Family and the US office were a success.
Where they just try to copy and past a show never works. Probably means they just got the rights cheaply and decide to do ANY similar program to keep competitors out.
They are hugely appreciated in Australia and New Zealand. We have a very similar sense of humour and a very strong sense of self-deprecation.
Actually American audiences love British comedies, but they're only available on PBS, BBC America, or BritBox. Historically they've only been accessible on PBS, which is the public owned station.
FT was quintessentially English. It was about class, repressed sexuality, failed aspirations etc. It was never going to relate well abroad.
Another thing that went against the US versions creating enough build-up to the final pay-off was lack of time: most "half hour" sitcoms were actually 22-23minutes long. Losing those 5 or 6 minutes from the ad-free BBC running time was crucial when they were trying to recreate the same plots.
When you commented on shouting I immediately understood, but also simultaneously thought of Frasier Crane. Quite similarly, Frasier himself ends up on a madcap rant because he's lost the plot, but never does the shouting come across as too real. There are sincere heartfelt moments on the series where characters express their pain and feelings, however no one fundamentally changes who they are. Everyone continues in their little quirky realm because that's what makes the chemistry work.
I remember hearing somewhere that the Mel Brooks-produced The Nutt House was a (very loose) adaptation of Fawlty Towers as well - but I'm not inclined to explore it in detail, having seen quite enough of it when it was shown on BBC2...
Thanks for the comprehensive video! Really nice work. I loved the original Fawlty Towers but had only seen the Bea Arthur version, which I gave up on after the first episode.
I would have said the reason Fawlty Towers doesn't work in the US is because it's about class and snobbery. But then along came Frasier which was all about class and snobbery and was a huge hit
I've always felt that Newhart was the closest American kin to Fawlty Towers. What they did right was that they made it their own. Bob never tried to be John Cleese or be a Basil clone, and they understood culture. It never tried to be Fawlty Towers and it worked.
Hear me out. . Imagine Ed O'Neil and Katey Sagal from MARRIED WITH CHILDREN in the Basil and Sybil roles....
Cheers is rumoured to have been inspired by Fawlty Towers as well, except that they didn't have the budget for a hotel so it was only a bar. Dianne plays the upper class blonde, Coach is the incompetent help and Carla offends the guests.
Diane strikes more as Hyacinth Bucket than Cybil (sorry if that's the wrong spelling) Fawlty. She only wishes she was an upper class blonde and puts on a show to make everyone think she is.
Ues I had the same thought that Cheers is close to FT
Betty White was too nice to play Sybil. But if Bea Arthur had played Sybil opposite Harvey Korman I think it could have worked
You should a video about the British remake of Married... with Children.
The sad part is the missed opportunity of Betty White and Harvey Corman together, in a different show.
I’m enjoying the heck out of this channel! Can’t wait to see some of my favorites like abfab or are you being served!
Thank you! Those are coming!
The most enduring and most beloved British comedy characters tend to be people blighted by failure, characters whose dreams never came true, whose lives never turned out quite the way they'd hoped (Tony Hancock, Harold Steptoe, Rigsby, Basil Fawlty, Derek Trotter, Victor Meldrew, David Brent) - and I think the idea of 'celebrating' failure (or finding comedy in it) very much goes against the grain for aspirational, wise-cracking American sitcoms. The obvious exception being the magnificent Ernie Bilko (Phil Silvers, not Steve Martin), of course.
OMG! The german version "Hotel Zum letzten Kliff" with Jochen Busse. John Cleese approved of that remake. They consulted him for the german version. John Cleese even said that they'd done it "superbly"!
RTL (the german TV station) only aired the pilot.
I'm from germany, a big Fawlty Towers fan and have never heared of that german remake!
Monty Python specially recorded some episodes in German, for the German Language Market.
@@davidjames579 Yes, I know... and it was done very good.
I think they would have succeeded if they had the talented comedy writing team behind the American sitcom Seinfeld. Which had a lot of Fawlty Tower like moments and moments which were extremely funny in Seinfeld which are similar to the humour classic British comedy tv series from the 1970s and 1980s, . If Larry David and Seinfeld were behind it they probably would have been able to pull it off.
True, but then again a team like that would never do a remake because they are too original
You know who else… Woody Allen could probably write/direct a remake with the right actors. FT is broader comedy than his usual but I think he’d “get it” where a Hollywood stock screenwriter would not. (And a 40-something Woody might have been a decent Basil, there’s some overlap between Woody’s screen neuroses and Basil’s.)
John Cleese was the magic of the show. The supporting actors were superb, but were just supporting. Cleese did great in everything he did, yet the others are known for nothing else. That speaks to the talent of Cleese, not a reflection on the others because they all worked perfectly in Fawlty Towers. Cleese and Booth married in the first series and divorced between the two, but worked well together and were able to create the 2nd series. These American copies just bombed.. no one could touch his writing because he had no problem making a fool of himself and too many refuse to do that for fear of hurting their reputation.
Snavely etc would have had 3-4 commercial breaks cutting into them unlike FT.
Could you imagine if America tried to remake Monty Python. They didn't did they? Tell me they didn't!
Well, the closest to that is a fan film some high school kids in the USA made as a remake of holy grail - but that's a lot more endearing since it's just kids having a laugh
@@cinewhirl thank god, we can all be ok with kids having a laugh. if any of the studios had tried i think i'd cry
Monty Python inspired Lorne Michaels to create Saturday Night Live.
@@danpage6907 thank god he didn't try to remake it and just took inspiration
I think the Canadian show Kids In The Hall is a tribute to Monty Python though.
A co-worker shared an anecdote about a guy who worked at a car factory in the old country and stole one or two components each day to build himself a free car. When he finally put those parts all together he had somehow made a sewing machine. That's typically the result when Americans fail to transfer a British sitcom into an American "version" without understanding how or why the original worked.
Coupling U.S. was an amalgam of all the mistakes you described here. It must have seemed like a simple and sure-fire way to capture the Friends audience. Instead, it was the first of many failed copycats. Loosely, the main idea of a small clutch of young friends living as neighbours is as old as television comedy itself.
The successful U.S. conversions of Britcoms like Man About The House (Three's Company) and Steptoe and Son (Sanford and Son) took only the most basic framework or the originals but fashioned entirely different American characters and dialogue to make them work.
Yeah British characters just don't really work as Americans, it just doesn't work. There are genuinely funny American characters in their own right, i.e Seinfeld, but trying to take a funny British character and making him funny in America just isn't funny. Its a completely different place with different people who think and interact so differently, so it comes over as so fake as to not be even remotely funny, just fake af.
@@johnba291972 A British writer-producer had a semi-biographical sitcom called *Joking Apart* for two seasons/series. It used the typical *Seinfeld* stand-up bit at the end (and sometimes at the start) to tag the situational subject of each episode. Like Seinfeld, it was meant to be a comic playing a semi-fictional version of his life with his former GF and a neighbour pal interacting in goofy sitcom ways.
You'd struggle to see it as a London version of Seinfeld. None of the characters were like their nominal NYC sitcom personas. Also, the scripts were not based on Seinfeld episode ideas.
Although this has been strictly denied, you'd be forgiven for seeing the show *Coupling* as a British version of *Friends.* The similarities are more in the skeletons than in the fleshing-out of the different shows. When NBC tried to do *Coupling-U.S.* by copying the English sitcom scripts as a Friends time-slot replacement, it failed.
The humour in Man About The House was contemporary, or at least the high concept was; the shock!horror! of a single man sharing a flat with two single women. There’s nothing remotely controversial, surprising or daring about that today (unless, say, it’s set in Iran).
The main thing I notice is the Americans are just jumping from one-liner to one-liner. "My, line is done, now it's your turn." In the original, there was a life to the characters between the lines, as it were. The actors stayed in the bit, in the overall scene. There was a hotel being run at all times. The US versions just go from bit to bit, and the overall setting is just another background for discrete jokes.
Its sad because they had the abbott/costello "cross-talk" style in America, but seem to miss it when it is done elsewhere. Or is it actually a lost art in the 'states?
i’ll admit the “mo run upstairs” bit did get me
Bea and Betty boh starred in The Golden Girls and Bea and Harvey both starred in the Star Wars Holiday Special.
i think maybe Golden Palace may have fit this in some way. thank you for the vid!
I did accidentally found american remakes of both Absolutely Fabulous and Spaced on UA-cam. Thought you liked to know.
Cheers!
I can't imagine a US version of Spaced unless they changed 99% of the jokes!
Just discovered your channel today, it's great stuff
Thank you!
I've just heard there was a Red dwarf USA, look forward to you maybe doing that too 😊
It's a fascinating story, if you hear how the British writers were involved, the Americans interpretation of the show, and then the British writers not being involved. It's a perfect example of why so many of these US remakes don't work.
This is a great idea for a YT channel. Looking forward to more. I am kinda suprised that you dont show a bit of the origonal British series as a comparison
That's a problem with UA-cam copyright system I'm afraid, I did it in my Vicar of Dib video and got a load of matches.
@@cinewhirl thats a shame. I thought it was alright to do, if you edit it into your own thing? Great video anyway
Spot-on analysis on what made these American remakes (and most remakes in general) fail. Though I never knew both Betty White and Bea Arthur were in Fawlty Tower remakes.... so fascinating! Great channel... as a die-hard TV geek, I just subscribed!!!!
Thank you, glad you enjoyed it!
Wow! Another great video! I had watched videos on these before, but I hadn't found one that discusses all 3. I remember seeing in an interview that Bea Arthur thought the main reason Amanda's failed was because she didn't have a man playing a male Sybil for her to spar with. And I definitely agree. John Cleese seems to think that it was because it was a woman full stop!
Cheers! Yeah I thought doing all three in one video was better
But Sybil was played as a real woman with real emotions, something Bea Arthur was never able to pull off. Her characters were cartoon.
@@tomcooper6108 well, she was supposed to be playing Basil, who was definitely a cartoon!
18:14
I agree. That scene is far too dramatic. If you'd not told me, I probably wouldn't have guessed this was a rippoff.
John Cleese has a great way of hiding his frustration.
Thinking one thing but saying another.
I'm not much into American sitcoms, but I do like original comedys. My girlfriend introduced me to Rules Of Engagement.. witch is quite good.
And she showed me Phoneshop... so funny bruv.
(plonkers)
Oh yeah. Guys talking about Red Dwarf in the comments...
Thanks for the memories ✌
John Cleese: So, how's everything going?
Producer of Amanda's: Doing great! We're going to have a great show! We just made one minor change.
Cleese: What was that?
Producer: Um, we took out Basil.
Cleese: Wut?!
I saw the Snavely pilot on UA-cam, and it's sad that Betty White and Harvey Korman didn't seem to have much chemistry together. I wonder how it might have worked if it had gone to series.
The main problem with Amanda's is the fact that Bea Arthur was pretty much Sybil and Basil combined, although she seemed to me more Sybil than Basil - except for Amanda having Basil's tendency to jump to conclusions. Then, they tried to make us sympathize with her. Which is the problem with American versions of British shows with a ... shall we say, less than lovable character: we try to *make* the characters lovable - a tactic that fails miserably every time. Basil Fawlty was an unregenerate tyrant whom people loved anyway. Amanda's too quickly showed us Amanda's softer side by giving her adversaries who were nastier than she was. That didn't work simply because none of the characters can stand up to Bea Arthur without bastardizing her, which is why they dumped the Fawlty character in the first place.
And they made the same mistake with Payne. John Larroquette could have made the perfect American Basil Fawlty -- except the producers wouldn't let him. Yet again, they softened the character because they thought American audiences would never warm up to a totally reprehensible character ... like Basil Fawlty. Interestingly, John Cleese approved of THIS version and verbally agreed to a recurring role should Payne be renewed for a second season. And, of course, it wasn't.
The closest thing we had to that type of characterization was Buffalo Bill with Dabney Coleman, who specialized in those types of reprehensible characters. But we just didn't get it at the time, and Buffalo Bill died a quick death. Then, they tried again with The Slap Maxwell Story, and, yes, the network ruined it by making the character sympathetic. Then, there was Drexel's Class, which wasn't all that funny IMO, and Madman of the People, which was okay but made the same mistake as ever by trying to sympathize the character far too quickly. And that didn't work any better than it ever does.
And THAT is why the American AbFab attempts never made it to series. One would have starred Kristen Johnson (3rd Rock) as Patsy, and the other would have starred Carrie Fisher, though I'm not sure if she would have played Patsy or Eddy. Either one might have made it work, and I actually wish I lived in an alternate universe where Carrie Freaking Fisher played in American AbFab. That would have been AWESOME!!
But really, American television should stay far away from Britcoms. We do that no better with that than we do kaiju.
Ab Fab from the author of Postcards From The Edge sounds ideal. I imagine Carrie would have had some writing involvement, and she had the right temperament and humour to do this. Not sentimental at all.
No surprise that a US remake of Absolutely Fabulous failed: the source material was abysmal.
@@markchambers3833 I liked AbFab. Sometimes it's funny.
So, one The Golden Girls stared in Fawlty Towers remake pilot, and then went on to star in The Golden Palace, which Bea Arthur guest stared on it,
I remember seeing Amanada's when it came out. They made the Manuel character French-Canadian and said "He's from Toronto" instead of "He's from Barcelona." I've lived in or around Toronto my entire life. The French-Canadian community is tiny and they all speak English. You wouldn't get very far in Toronto if you couldn't speak English.
I read someone's comment recently that French-Canadian Director Denis Villeneuve probably didn't get a joke in English because of the Language Barrier. As I responded, he's French-Canadian, not French!
I think Bea Arthur comes across as just angry when she’s being sarcastic. John Cleese being sarcastic in Fawlty would do it with a smile or in the form of a question. So it was like he was still being nice to the guest despite insulting them. Maybe the only person who could have come close to possibly being an American Basil was John Ritter. He had physical comedic talents and occasionally was sarcastic in Threes Company.
The canned laughing doesn't help
Actually, none used canned laughter.
From the clips shown i actually felt like payne looked the best, then snavely and finally amandas. The payne clips got a laugh out of me, i know its very heavily based on fawlty towers but i actually like the fact the comedy style was totally different, it looks more like a typical american sitcom. Snavely felt like a poor imitation of fawlty, trying to be a direct copy but failing. Amandas just didnt seem funny in the slightest and that tonal shift you showed was just bizzare!
Ive never been a huge fan of fawlty towers, its one of those shows that seems to be almost universally adored but none of it really resonated with me. I like a lot from the same time period but i think i prefer more understated comedy.
Another really interesting video :)
Thank you, glad you enjoyed the video!
Season 3 INCOMING written and starting JC
When I first saw Amanda's I did not know that it was a 're-make' of Fawlty Towers, but by the first commercial I kept telling my friend--who was watching with me, you know, back when friends were close enough that they spent time together without one of them being on the phone?--this is a rip off of that PBS show Fawlty Towers. Mark, my friend, actually came over to watch Fawlty with me the next week and after doing so, we rejected Amanda's and never went back to her hotel by the sea. I did find this informative in that it showed me that Betty and Harvey worked together before going on to success in Mama's Family, and Betty worked on a Fawlty 'remake' and so did Bea Arthur before they worked together in Golden Girls.
The first two adap-tations featured two of The Golden Girls!
They screwed up “Dad’s Army” too!
Check “Over the top” loose adaptation with Tim curry and Steve Carell
Also, Newhart is Fawlty Towers through an American Comedic perspective. They are very different in approach but similar premises.
I don’t know why but in a lot of these American remakes they take the same joke but over explain them until they become unfunny. It’s like they think they need to explain why it’s funny but it takes all the humour out of it. Like the terrible chief joke, after it subverted the expectation it should have ended but they just make it all worse!
Yeah agree with you on that, Family Guy is the worst offender for explaining every joke
When they're not explaining the joke, they're overacting and putting 'comedy face' on.
It's like American T.V thinks Americans are too stupid to know what a joke is, unless it's made obvious they're not being serious.
American television executives are terrified someone won't get a joke and change shows, so writers are forced to explain everything.
"Night Court" had a scene where Roz took too much insulin for her diabetes and was delirious. Dan (John Laroquette) realized she thought she was a child and he replied to her as if he were her dad. It was a tense, moving scene. Right in the middle, they had Christine say that he was pretending to be her father. It was jarring and spoiled the scene for me.
@@alfsmith4936 Unfortunately, a lot of Americans will and do need expllanations for any comedy that isn't slapstick where someone gets hurt. I'm America, BTW.
I think one of the reasons they don't work that well is because the original Fawlty Towers was based on John Cleese and Connie Booths, observations of these types of Hotels it's why it was 2 series because they had said what they wanted to say. Such as Manuel is Spanish because Spain was a popular place for cheap hotel managers to get staff from at the time, that's what made it funny and everything fit and make sense. I.e. why Bazil still employs him. Whereas Albanian refugee for example is just odd, I don't think that holds any relevance to the time and even less now.
oh no! ... so I get that they thought they could replace John Cleese, an easy mistake to make, BUT you cannot replace Andrew Sachs... it's madness to even try. It's one of the hardest roles to play and I suspect only Andrew Sachs could actually pull it off. Obviously the same goes for John Cleese
For me, the only re-make (if you will) the Americans did that was really good was “All in the Family” which was based on “Till Death do us Part”.
I'm German and never knew of the German remake. Watching a minute of a scene from it on UA-cam told me it was better that way.
There's also a German IT Crowd which is basically a shot for shot remake!
@@cinewhirl Oh dear God, that one must have been even worse from what I see. I am not surprised, however, judging from the TV channels.
John Cleese has said that Cheers was based on Fawlty Towers
The moment that I saw Chris Morris in season 1 of the IT Crowd is the moment I knew there was a man that could actually maybe pull off a good Basil Fawlty.
Yeah I reckon he could do a similar character quite well
thank you for that. you are the first to agree with me. i'm in my 50's and my family and I watched them all so many times we wore out the recorded episodes VHS tape.@@cinewhirl
Oh nice! I recently picked up Fawlty Towers on Blu-ray to rewatch it for this video, it's still funny to this day.
I love that. i still may have all of them on an external hard drive. but not 100% certain yet@@cinewhirl
His farmer's union Spokesman in I'm Alan Partridge is a good comparison. Pompous and woolly headed.
The Office is one of the only comedy series migrations that worked. I really like Julia Davis's Camping, but the migration of that was mostly woeful.
You made a 26 minute video, yet missed the most fundamental reason why any remake, even a better-written, better-acted, more faithful American adaptation would fail.
"Fawlty Towers" is utterly carried by the character of Basil Fawlty. Yes, the other roles are funny, but it would still be a great show with different actors, or even those roles removed entirely. And Basil Fawlty is a quintessentially English character. He simply doesn't work as an American, or for that matter, any other race.
It's not that Fawlty is just an arrogant jerk. It's that he mixes this with a high-class snobbery, adherence to manners and decorum that is so distinctly English. And which makes his inevitable crack-ups and descent into delirious madness so hilarious, since it's such a contrast.
Fawlty, if he weren't so incompetent, could be the head butler for a duke. And what is the race that we most closely associate with being a butler, especially with high manners and a stiff upper lip? The English, of course.
None of the humor and uniqueness of the character works or even makes sense if he is American. You have to come up with an entirely different character, which in turn would be a different show entirely.
I enjoyed that a lot. Absolutely spot on analysis.
Thank you!
1982’s “No Soap, Radio” was partially an American remake of Fawlty Towers, but partially an American remake of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
I dreading to know if there had ever been an American Python remake.
Watching this catalogue of abysmal copies got me wondering if a UK production house had ever remade anything from the US.
I have a feeling is just one way, the US production houses looking to "Americanise" a UK product.
The UK did try a remake of Friends....
Can you imagine The Major in the Chief's place?
"I got a happy ending, Fawlty!"
Thanks for this analysis. Unquestionably, a masterpiece that in the great British tradition kept true to the art form rather than beating a show premise to death. I remember seeing Fawlty Towers on PBS here in the States circa 1981 perhaps, and adored it from the beginning. It is the tightest show ever written, in my perspective. No extraneous dialogue. I think I tried to stomach Amanda's Place, but I was not a fan of Bea Arthur's (at the time at least), and she just came across as an old battle-axe. I did try to give "Payne" a try with very low expectations, and it was patiently AWFUL. I never liked John Larroquette, and I thought the names were just stupid puns. "Royal Payne"???? Come on. And I seem to remember the Connie Booth character had some weird hippie name like "Breeze" or similar. Basically, it was what Basil Fawlty goes on and on about to the Hamiltons in "Waldorf Salad" when discussing Harold Robbins. "Really the most awful American....well, transatlantic tripe. Sort of pornographic Muzak...." That being said, casting Harvey Korman as Basil Fawlty should have fit perfectly. He really can capture that nastiness and aggressive bully part as well as that pathetic obsequiousness so well. I'll need to find "Snavely" and see what I think. I know it can't compare to Fawlty Towers, but the original was essentially John Cleese and Connie Booth's other child, and a labor of love. The remakes were just attempts at cash-generating machines at the US networks. In these pre-Jerry Seinfeld days, maybe except for Bob Newhart's two successful shows in the 70s and 80s, there really wasn't much emphasis on the artist's creativity. EDIT: I started to watch the Snavely pilot, and I'd say it suffers from the directing. I've seen Harvey Korman in other roles where he could have played the Basil Fawlty character to a "T". Here, he seems to be playing the character as an effeminate man; he could have played it much more aggressively like Cleese. Another problem is networks' attempts for mass appeal. Unfortunately, lots of US network TV at the time seemed unable to use comic subtlty (not all, and again, I think Bob Newhart). The show just comes across as insulting the audience's intelligence, punctuated by the laugh track which essentially tells the audience, "the joke is here; laugh".
Really interesting. Thanks for this 😀
There's no comparison to Cleese. Yes, I'm a huge fan of Bea Arthur and Harvey Korman but their shows just didn't have "it" and Cleese's show did and remains a classic today.
US people would have rejected the betty white/corman series, its an exact copy of the Brit version that was already being shown on PBS. Sanford and Son had some differences from Steptoe and Son and was a success. All in the Family was different then Till Death Do Us Part and was a success, I'm sure there are other examples (The Office). I wonder how many, if any, American sitcoms were copied across the pond.
A remake of "The Golden Girlls" called "Brighton Belles" was a huge failure in the UK.
Sanford and Son was goood also because the characters were not just a pc copy and paste of Steptoe and Son, and Fox was superb.
It's funny that Amanda's was cancelled and considered a failure shooting 13 episodes and Fawlty Towers only shot 12 episodes and is loved to this day. I have it on DVD. I'd get it on Blu Ray but here in America I don't believe thats possible.
What I remember about Pain, which I thought was called Royal Pains, is that the set was reversed and that the Manuel character was just not funny. Not having a funny Manuel character really hurt the show from what I remember watching. I remember Royal's car going over the edge of a cliff and John Larroruette saying "The duck!" worried about the dinner going over the edge in the car. He tried to play the part being as stressed as John Cleese playing the part Basil on the verge of having a heart attack most of the time. But I think that award goes to John Cleese.
Interesting note. The part of Murphy Brown on television was written for JoBeth Williams, a great role for any actess. But JoBeth wanted to keep going with her career on the big screen and turned it down. The part then went to Candice Bergin. JoBeth's big screen career seemed to disappear. Then she took the role in Pain. She probably should've gone with Murphy Brown. But Candice nailed the part.
Royal Pains was a sitcom in the US about a doctor who gets in trouble after an important patient dies, so he has to move to the Hamptons and become a concierge doctor to rich people.
Here are my three Fawlty casting choices. Hiddleston. Ioan Gruffudd (sp) or John Lithgow
British and American comedy are just far too different. British comedy tends to be darker and sarcastic whereas American humour is so theatrical and slapstick.
Actually Cheers was going to be a loose remake of Faulty Towers with Bill Cosby in the Basil role. But when the writers saw that all there best jokes took place in the bar of the hotel, they scrapped the hotel idea altogether and made the entire series about a bar.
Surely the cheapest and best solution would have been to just SHOW FAWLTY TOWERS and let the audience find it. Or are U.S. Americans too stuck in their own cultural tar pit to manage that? Is that a silly question...? 🤔
The only successful American sitcoms that were originated from the UK were Sandford And Son, Three's Company and All In the Family.
Were Betty White's abd Bea Arthur's versions both made before Golden Girls?
So weird that they made that last one so “nice”. Casting Larroquette makes sense, given he spend years playing a mostly unrepentant jerk that everyone loved on Night Court. He would’ve been perfect for a meaner, edgier show like FT.
The American Fawlty Towers is Bob Newhart's show[s].
You just can't successfully copy a show when the crux of the humor is the personal talent of star. You need a show where the humor comes the situation, you just can't 'script' Basil.
You didn't mention Del being played by John Leguizamo, aka Luigi, from the live action Mario Bros movie
As an American and lifelong Fawlty Towers fan, my only question is: why? FT is quintessentially English, that's the source of its humor (or humour, rather), leave it alone. It was also a product of its time and of a very particular group of highly talented people, so even a British remake would be doomed to fail.
John Cleese: Hold my Dom Perignon.
Apart from the fact that English humour doesn't really translate to American humour because they don't have expreience with similar characters in real life that the English do, Fawlty Towers was blessed with the perfect cast, and that's not anyone's fawlt. The Americans' only fawlt was attempting to re-create something which not only wouldn't travel well across the Atlantic, but which was already perfect.
I assume the Spaced and Red Dwarf pilots are coming soon.
They are on the list!
There is only one Fawlty Towers. However i do like Payne and still watch it from time to time.
Peep show and the Inbetweeners US remakes were insanely painful.
Skins, also As for the Spaced pilot, oh my god.
You missed a fourth Fawlty Towers re-make. It ran for 7 episodes in 2007. It was called "Fawlty Tower Oxnard".
It's surprising how many US TV comedies of the time turned into dramas. I think it's something to do with christian influence and them trying to appeal to the larger christian audience at the time, as well as a lot of wealth people being religiously "touched".
Harvey Korman stole the show in Blazing Saddles, Bea Arthur was just being Bea Arthur, and John Larroquette was great in the show where he was a reformed alcoholic managing a bus station, so I'm not sure he had an interest in watering down the remake. I suspect it's a public TV thing, as the cable channels could be a bit more risque.
yup they were all crap, the US has never managed to recreate any UK comedy in a decent way IMO.
Thank you for putting this together.
You must never have seen any remake by Norman Lear.
These remakes should have got Connie Booth involved. As she is co writer of Fawlty Towers and American so would have a better idea of what would work in the US.