remix and remake
Sep. 26th, 2003 01:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quislibetAs I listen to an 80s show on internet radio that has a fondness for playing extended dance remixes of your New Wave favorites, I find myself thinking, if you're going to do a remix of something, you should make it interesting or at least listenable, dammit.
Which leads me to the vaguely analogous situation of watching NBC's "Coupling" last night, a remake of a BBC sitcom. I will stick to the original, even if no new episodes ever get shown on this side of the Atlantic. J. put into words something I had been thinking: it was like watching a local high school production of a play we'd already seen done well professionally. You don't necessarily notice just how much a good actor brings to his or her part until you see a mediocre one saying the same lines in the same situations.
A review I read of it (was it in The Metro yeterday?) also said it was no match for its model, but furthermore, strangely, complained that the jokes and situations were all lame and overdone clichés. Perhaps the reviewer didn't realize that these were the same jokes, almost to the word, as the ones in the BBC version, which s/he had apparently liked. But with better actors, I guess, the jokes just work better, never mind their quality in some sort of absolute sense.
Or maybe it's just that them foreign people sure are a hoot!
Either way, my Thursday evenings at 9:30 are free.
Which leads me to the vaguely analogous situation of watching NBC's "Coupling" last night, a remake of a BBC sitcom. I will stick to the original, even if no new episodes ever get shown on this side of the Atlantic. J. put into words something I had been thinking: it was like watching a local high school production of a play we'd already seen done well professionally. You don't necessarily notice just how much a good actor brings to his or her part until you see a mediocre one saying the same lines in the same situations.
A review I read of it (was it in The Metro yeterday?) also said it was no match for its model, but furthermore, strangely, complained that the jokes and situations were all lame and overdone clichés. Perhaps the reviewer didn't realize that these were the same jokes, almost to the word, as the ones in the BBC version, which s/he had apparently liked. But with better actors, I guess, the jokes just work better, never mind their quality in some sort of absolute sense.
Or maybe it's just that them foreign people sure are a hoot!
Either way, my Thursday evenings at 9:30 are free.
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no subject
Date: 2003-09-26 10:53 am (UTC)BBC America kicks TLC's ASS. When will these producers learn? Just because you can copy a British game show or a Scandanavian reality contest does not mean you can make quality programming.
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Date: 2003-09-26 10:57 am (UTC)When we've taken over the world and there's nothing that's not us to copy?
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Date: 2003-09-26 11:01 am (UTC)ha!
no subject
Date: 2003-09-26 11:05 am (UTC)