A quick story for you.
In the 1980s, a group of American TV producers were talking about making their own version of Fawlty Towers. “We absolutely love this show,” they said. “But there’s a problem. Can’t we cut out this character, this Baysil?” And so that – unbelievably – is what they did. They made Fawlty Towers without Basil Fawlty and called it Amanda’s By The Sea. And it was a disaster. Like you’d expect. Like all – all – American remakes are.
Which brings me – in a pretty prejudiced frame of mine, admittedly – to The Killing (Thursday, Channel 4, 9pm), an American remake of the Danish crime drama Forbrydelsen. The original, which was shown on BBC Four earlier this year, was a beautiful piece of television, a drama with the dimmer switch down, the tension up, the pace just right and a wonderful central character in the police officer Sarah Lund. She was solid. A rock that moved. Likeable. Annoying. But real.
The plotting and pace of Forbrydelsen was pretty wonderful too: it tugged at you rather than yelled; guided rather than pushed. And then there was the way the whole thing was shot: vaguely, dreamily, with a camera that stopped and stared at faces, at tiny details, but most of all at the city of Copenhagen with its lifts that clanked and drains that dripped and lights that could go out at any time.
It’s hardly surprising that American TV producers took notice of it all, but with this new version, which is set in Seattle, what they have ended up making is a slightly wonky copy. It’s correct in most details but changed in silly, and sometimes significant, ways.
Take the opening few seconds of the first episode, for example. In the original, Sarah is given an inflatable man complete with phallus as a leaving present; in the American version she is presented with a female dummy that’s still got its pants on. In the original, there is also a woman naked in a bed; in the US remake, a shy, censoring, American arm is draped over the breasts. These are mere details, really, but ones that reveal the violent yet prudish nature of American culture.
The new version of Sarah (Linden rather than Lund), played by Mirielle Enos, is a pretty poor copy too and of course this version is American so her lips and breasts are 25% bigger and her cheeks are 30% plumper. She’s also much more unpleasant, which is something they’ve done to the other characters too, and this sadly takes them closer to the police-drama cliches that Forbrydelsen so successfully avoided.
It’s all of these changes taken together that highlight one of the central problems with this US take on The Killing. Like taking Basil Fawlty out of Fawlty Towers, the question is: why bother? But equally, if you make something in exactly the same way – as the director Gus Van Sant did with Psycho – you have to ask the question again: why bother?
What the BBC did was not bother at all and simply show the original Danish version instead. So why couldn’t the Americans have done the same thing? Why do they have to convert everything into American? And why, in turn, do we then have to have the American version shown to us, by which time it’s become like one of those old VHS tapes, copied and copied until it’s grainy, wobbly, grey, unwatchable?
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