If the shtick fits ...

Don’t look now, but George Jefferson, that foul-tempered, jive-talking scourge of 1970s white American complacency, is alive and well and living in South America. Only he’s pudgier than he used to be and not half as ornery. He runs a carwash business now instead of dry cleaners, but he still has his famously thin skin -- a few shades lighter than before.

Oh, and he’s got a new name: Miguel Galindo.

In his Spanish-speaking incarnation, he’s the star attraction of “Los Galindo,” a Chilean remake of “The Jeffersons,” the CBS situation comedy that aired from 1975 to ’85. Strange as it sounds, throughout Latin America locally produced versions of “The Jeffersons” and other popular American sitcoms are gaining loyal audiences, winning over networks and producers, and often gaining a surprising new relevancy in societies swept by change.

Using updated scripts and shot on sets that are witty, Latin-accessorized re-creations of the originals, remakes of “Married

The most startling, and risky, venture of the lot may be “Los Galindo,” based on a show whose all-American pedigree and barbed, race-based humor would seem hard to transfer to another culture. Set in a Bel-Air-like district of this smog-choked capital city, “Los Galindo” echoes the premise of “The Jeffersons,” in which a nouveau riche African American clan moved to a “de-luxe apartment” on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and embarked on a swanky new lifestyle.

The Galindos don’t belong to an ethnic minority, but they do represent a relatively new element in Chilean society: the self-made, middle-class urbanites who’ve embraced free-market values with a vengeance since the 1990 ouster of Chile’s longtime dictator-President Augusto Pinochet. Their ascent is shaking up the social and economic status quo, much to the chagrin of the old-guard moneyed elite. Which may help explain why “Los Galindo,” in only its first season, is expected to garner a ratings share of at least 25% when figures are announced Monday, which would make it one of Chile’s top-rated TV shows.

“It’s very interesting in Chile what’s happening with the nouveaux riches. There is a compulsion to consume, to buy,” says Luis Dubo, the respected Chilean actor who portrays el Senor Galindo. In modern-day Chile, Dubo says, the “neo-liberal principles” of globalization are “the new Mass.”

That gives “Los Galindo” currency, but the quality of the writing, high production values and solidly built setup, borrowed from “The Jeffersons,” will make the show a hit, Dubo believes. “It was a very well-realized structure,” he says of “The Jeffersons.” “It functioned like a clock.”

Like virtually all of the new sitcom remakes in Latin America, “Los Galindo” is being co-produced by Sony Pictures Television International, which has been aggressively seeking out new partnerships in Europe, Asia and Latin America since the early 1990s. Michael Lynton, Sony Pictures Entertainment chairman, says his company is simply responding to a growing global demand for locally produced programming, even when the shows are based on U.S. formats.

“Local programming around the world seems to have much more resonance with the audience than it did a decade ago,” Lynton says. “The local programming itself is much better than it used to be. Part of the reason for that is also economics. It’s cheaper to produce good programming today than it was 10 or 15 years ago.”

Increasingly, viewers in developing markets such as Latin America want to see their own rapidly evolving lives and societies mirrored in the shows they watch. They’re also more willing to try out new genres they may have seen on cable and satellite instead of rehashing the melodramatic telenovela formula of seething, macho men and misty-eyed, martyred heroines. That has opened the door for sitcoms, which until recently were alien to Latin TV’s comic traditions.

“Latin American comedy is very sketch-comedy-oriented,” says Steve Kent, senior executive vice president of international production for Sony Pictures Television International. “It’s a lot of sketches done in cheap-by-design-looking sets and a lot of, for lack of a better word, pie-in-the-face humor. But it’s not heavily story dependent. It’s sight gags, it’s tripping over things.” What Sony can bring to the table, Kent says, is expertise in crafting sitcom narratives and characters who can evolve over successive seasons.

In some cases, Latin producers and directors are convinced that, with all due respect to Hollywood, their remakes are funnier, edgier and more balanced dramatically than the U.S. originals. “Colombian humor is not politically correct,” says Paulo Laserna Phillips, president of the powerful, independent Canal Caracol network in Bogota, which scored a major new hit last year with its remake “Casados con Hijos” (Married With Children), co-produced with Sony. “You in the United States ... have an attitude that is very balanced. Here we aren’t that cautious, not in themes of gender, not in themes of race, not in themes of religion. We are much more daring.”

Humor’s resale value

While the giant networks Televisa, in Mexico, and Globo, in Brazil, have been exporting their programs for years, smaller Latin companies are beginning to join in. In 2003, Sony bought the rights to make an Indian version of the cash-cow comic telenovela “Yo Soy Betty, la Fea” (I Am Betty, the Ugly) from Canal Caracol’s principal Colombian rival, RCN. Sony’s Hindi adaptation, “Jassi Jassi Koi Nahin” (There’s No One Like Jassi) has become a hit. Laserna says that while growing less culturally isolated, Colombia has found that its idiosyncratic, colloquial humor has outside resale value.

Among the most ambitious of the new-breed Latino independent TV producers is Roos Film, an innovative, 11-year-old, Santiago-based company that uses the “Mission: Impossible” theme for its call-waiting music. Roos, headquartered in a renovated red-brick house with state-of-the-art post-production facilities, co-produces “Los Galindo” and a Chilean version of “Mad About You” called “Loco por Ti” with Sony.

Recently, Roos and Sony sold another co-production, “Bienvenida Realidad” (Welcome to Reality), to the NBC-owned Telemundo network (where it will be dubbed from Chilean Spanish into more neutral Mexican Spanish for U.S. distribution) as well as to a network in Ecuador.

Now in its second season, “Bienvenida,” a one-hour drama about six young Chileans grappling with school, sex, drugs, relationships and other angst-inducing obsessions, is the first original dramatic program that Sony has co-produced in Latin America. “Today it’s a very much balanced relationship, because we are also putting products in the States,” says J.J. Harting, Roos Film’s suave, bilingual executive director.

Actors, directors and production crews in countries like Chile and Colombia say that the boom in locally made prime-time TV shows has been a boon to them. Until recently, prime-time was completely dominated by telenovelas, which pay even top stars only a fraction of what a U.S. actor earns for a supporting role in a first-year show. Though mastering the sitcom rhythm is a challenge, Chilean actors say, it’s worth it for the extra opportunities.

Meanwhile, Chilean film directors who’ve always regarded TV work as a commercial sellout or have worked mainly in telenovelas are watching as a wave of young Argentine directors with broader experience in sitcoms and dramas flood their country. “There’s a freedom here,” says Matias Stagnaro, 32, an Argentine who has been working in Chile for two years and directed 18 of the 27 episodes of “Bienvenida Realidad.” Harting says he often prefers hiring Argentine directors to Chilean ones weaned on telenovelas who “get so used to the cliches that they don’t recognize them.”

The migration of ideas

There’s a certain irony to a show like “Los Galindo” or “Bienvenida Realidad” -- which Sony’s Kent describes as “ ‘Dawson’s Creek’ for Latin America” -- being marketed as home-grown Chilean product. But a 100% original, made-from-scratch program is a rare commodity in contemporary global television, where ideas leap oceans and program formats are bought and sold like hog futures. It’s worth remembering that some of the most era-defining U.S. shows of the past 30 years -- “All in the Family,” “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” -- were virtual clones of earlier British programs.

Both Sony and its Latin co-producers say they want their new sitcoms to feel tailor-made for a specific country. Though there’s a familiar methodology for putting these shows together, they say, the final product shouldn’t look as if it rolled off a Culver City assembly line.

“One of the decisions Sony made a long time ago is, we don’t do any pan-regional programming. There’s no such thing as a ‘South American’ person,” says Brendan Fitzgerald, a Sony senior vice president of international production who focuses on Latin America.

“To a great extent, American writers have the most experience in how to tell a story in 22 minutes, in 43 minutes, in 87 minutes, or whatever,” Fitzgerald continues. “And to a great extent they are also not the right people to write the final shooting script, because the same man or woman who is sitting in the San Fernando Valley, who is an absolute master at crafting this kind of storytelling for this kind of television, simply has not lived the reality.”

Defining the current “reality” of a country like Colombia, with its ongoing 40-year civil war, or Chile, with its traumatic and shame-filled recent past, isn’t easy for most natives, let alone foreigners. Turning that reality into the stuff of “must-see TV” is harder still.

The right-wing Pinochet regime kept the Chilean media heavily regulated and fearful of controversy, says Harting, comparing the environment to that of Spain during the Franco dictatorship. The country’s film and TV industry “was very moralizing, and it was totally over-controlled,” he says. Under Pinochet, he adds, an incident like the kiss between two female characters in an episode of “Bienvenida” never would’ve been allowed.

Fifteen years later, with most of the old censorship restrictions gone, Chilean popular culture still must deal with self-censorship, says Mateo Iribarren, a scriptwriter and actor on “Los Galindo” and another Roos show, “Tiempo Final.” “We have our internal Pinochet,” he says.

Yusef Rumie, Iribarren’s writing partner and fellow member of the Santiago avant-garde theater company Bufon Negro (Black Clown), says that through comedy Chileans finally may be able to confront some of the country’s political demons. “In Chile we have a saying: At the dinner table we don’t speak of God, politics or of football,” Rumie says. “The humor is important to be able to enter in these themes.”

Tweaking the formula

Judging by viewings of past episodes and a recent live shooting session, the cast of “Los Galindo” appears to be channeling “The Jeffersons’ ” funky irreverence, with a distinctly Chilean twist. Taking a break between scenes, Carmina Riego, the actress who plays Senora Galindo, says that her big-haired, flouncy character is an exaggerated version of Chilean female coquettishness.

“It’s in the look -- more hair, more eyes,” she says. “The Chilean women are super flirty.” Yet because of Chile’s long-standing sexual conservatism -- divorce became legal barely 1 1/2 years ago -- that flirtatiousness had to be expressed in a very “indirect” way, Riego says.

Though “Los Galindo” hasn’t dealt with the old divorce taboo, other episodes have addressed issues of cultural machismo, class snobbery and Chile’s long-held stigma against middle- and upper-class women working outside the home.

“Los Galindo,” in a sense, echoes Dubo’s own life story, of a boy from a poor family who spent years working in experimental theater and independent film before landing his first starring TV role. “He is Miguel Galindo,” says Ignacio Eyzaguirre, Roos’ director of production. “He’s very proud of his background, so he loves to show it, that this character can cross over in this society, which has been happening a lot.”

While the Roos crew heaps praise on “The Jeffersons,” it’s pointedly proud of the modifications it has made to create “Los Galindo.” “One thing we thought about the Jeffersons was they were too aggressive, so we took out some of the aggression,” says Eyzaguirre.

Ana Piterbarg, the principal director of “Los Galindo” and a fan of Ernst Lubitsch’s blithe comedies of manners, says that “The Jeffersons” “looks a little static” by today’s standards of camera motion. She encourages her actors to move more freely and fluidly. She also believes “Los Galindo” is more of a true ensemble piece than “The Jeffersons,” which revolved around Sherman Hemsley’s fulminating George.

Upward social mobility and sexual liberation also supply the backdrop to “Loco por Ti,” set in the Parque Forestal, a kind of Santiago SoHo. Only a few years ago, a show about thirtysomething urban dwellers might have had little social impact here. That has changed in the post-Pinochet era, and “Loco por Ti’s” yuppie-screwball antics are playing well in metropolitan Santiago, which holds about 40% of the country’s 15 million people. The show has an average prime-time share of 28%.

“Something happened in Chilean society that made us look to the Manhattan of the ‘90s,” says Eyzaguirre. “People are starting to get married later -- at 30 instead of 24, 26 -- and to become more urban, to live near parks and in neighborhoods like Providencia and to delay having children.”

Watching “Loco por Ti” at Roos headquarters, Eyzaguirre can’t help pointing out another U.S.-Chilean cultural difference. “Again, they’re much more tender than in the original American version,” he says of the kissing, cooing main characters. “We touch much more than you guys.”

A three-step strategy

Sony strongly encourages its Latin co-producers to incorporate such local color. Generally, the company follows a three-step strategy with sitcoms when entering a new television market. First, it will try to sell a dubbed version of a proven American hit, to air on a national broadcast network. Over the years, Sony has acquired a huge archive of television programs, and often it will propose a sitcom with a large number of episodes to pick from, so it can toss outdated or inappropriate scripts while leaving a large working stockpile. It also dispatches professionals to help train local directors, scriptwriters and production crews in the sitcom style of writing, lighting, camera angles and blocking actors.

If the show is successful, usually months or even years later, Sony will propose rewriting it in the local language and remaking it with local talent. With the partnerships formed through these ventures, Sony may then pursue a deal to co-produce an original, locally made program, as it did with “Bienvenida Realidad.” “Basically, we use sitcoms or drama remakes as a lower-risk way of having a channel get into business with us for a first time,” says Fitzgerald. “It sort of lowers the apprehension bar.”

Nevertheless, Sony’s Kent acknowledges, it can be tricky to persuade a Latin production company to take a chance on a remake of a show such as “Bewitched” or “The Jeffersons.” Colombian producers at first argued that Al Bundy’s couch potato shtick on “Married ... With Children” wouldn’t translate, because most Colombians don’t have TVs in their living rooms lest they interfere with all-important family gatherings.

Eventually, Sony was able to persuade the producers to keep the TV in the living room, while the character of Al, rechristened Paco Rocha and portrayed by actor Santiago Rodriguez, was conceived as slimmer, better-looking and less of a loser than Bundy. One of the show’s creators says that “Casados con Hijos” needed a lead character who was “a little more warm, a less defeatist relationship with life, more of a fighter, because that’s a little more of the Latin psychology.”

Kent says that “The Nanny” has proved to be a great “icebreaker” property in new markets because its Bronte-esque story line of “female employee meets and marries her boss” is pretty universal. “The Nanny” already has been remade for Greece, Turkey, Argentina and Russia, where it helped pry open the post-Iron Curtain television market. A Mexican remake in collaboration with Mexico’s Azteca network is scheduled to begin shooting this fall.

Once or twice, Sony admits, its remakes have misfired. A Mexican “Bewitched,” in which the Darrin Stephens character was converted into a clueless gringo from Chicago married to a Mexican enchantress, went off the air after only one season. “They had a bunch of funny moments, but it wasn’t strung together in a coherent form,” Kent says. “It sort of was a great case study of what not to do.”

Kent says that Rule No. 1 in selling a sitcom remake overseas is not to come storming into town like the Ugly American or, worse, the Ugly American With All the Answers. “We don’t come down [and say] ‘Get out of our way, we’re from Hollywood, we’re the expert,’ ” he says. “We view all these shows as a collaboration.”

As Fitzgerald pragmatically puts it, “The locals will notice you’re an empty suit long before your bosses find out.”

Reed Johnson can be contacted at Calendar.letters@latimes.com.