Hits from the Brits

JOHN SIMM was fine as a pinched-faced crusading journalist in the BBC’s political thriller “State of Play.” But wouldn’t the sun-kissed Brad Pitt work better in the film version? The soccer soap “Footballers’ Wives” was a hoot on BBC America. But wouldn’t more U.S. viewers watch if it were about American football?

The Brits know how to get fresh, saucy material on screen, and American producers, buoyed by NBC’s Emmy-winning remake of “The Office,” have started a buying spree hoping just a few tweaks will help them reach mass audiences in the U.S. Desperate for innovative fare, networks are tripping over one another to acquire formats that worked in Britain. Despite a sad history of losing the point in translation, resulting in disastrous remakes such as NBC’s “Coupling” in 2003, they forge ahead, undeterred.

Recently, CBS won out over Showtime and ABC to retool “Viva Blackpool!,” the BBC’s singing detective musical mystery series. That’s in addition to adapting the animated “Creature Comforts” with its British producers and a cast of American voices. “Arrested Development” creator Mitchell Hurwitz plans to remake the political comedy “The Thick of It.” Meanwhile, Showtime -- not even considering the adaptation may not work -- announced it will remake the family drama series “Cape Wrath” to air next summer as “Meadowlands.”

“The hunger for ideas is at an all-time high,” said Kathryn Mitchell, general manager of BBC America, whose undiluted British programming has served as a content smorgasbord for U.S. producers. “Everyone is trying to find that breakthrough hit.”

Almost every popular reality show, from “American Idol” and “Dancing With the Stars” to “Wife Swap” and “Supernanny,” has an English pedigree. Now scripted comedies and dramas, typically the preserve of small cable networks and cult fans, are accelerating their move into mainstream American homes and theaters. Universal is remaking “State of Play” with Pitt, Fox is developing “The Vicar of Dibley,” ABC “Footballers’ Wives” and NBC Universal Television “I’m With Stupid.”

Besides “The Office,” popular entertainment such as the film “The Departed” and the TV show “Ugly Betty” came from abroad (Hong Kong and Colombia, respectively), giving rise to the question of whether big-time Hollywood has run out of creative steam, or if its cautious and cumbersome system has made it too difficult and expensive for fresh ideas to break through.

“We’ve had to spread a very wide net and look at a lot of possibilities,” said Angela Bromstad, president of NBC Universal Television. “No stone has been left unturned in terms of finding something unique and that nobody has discovered yet.” The studio has cinched a first-look deal with Baby Cow, British comedian Steve Coogan’s production company. Three shows are in development: “I’m With Stupid,” an odd-couple show about “a guy with cerebral palsy in a wheelchair and a homeless guy”; “The IT Crowd,” a comedy about the secret life of geeks in a large corporation; and “Saxondale,” a comedy about a relationship between a former roadie and a pest exterminator.

While cable networks might be expected to court riskier material, broadcast is quickly following suit. David E. Kelley, for instance, is producing an Americanized version of “Life on Mars,” a time-travel cop show, for ABC.

Wayne Garvie, director of content and production for BBC Worldwide, said: “The U.S. audience is an amazingly sophisticated consumer of media. Everybody is raising their game, and raising it really fast.”

One reason the Brits appear to have fresher ideas, Garvie said, is that they are unhampered by the endless Hollywood chain of checkpoints, and are thus more likely to get their visions across on screen.

“The formats that work the best are the ones that could never possibly get developed here,” said Nick Grad, executive vice president of original programming at FX, which is developing “Bad Girls,” a prison soap from Shed Productions, a company of young British writers drawn to high-concept, fast-paced dramas.

Another advantage of imports for Hollywood executives: They’re already made. “It would have been hard for anyone to take a chance on ‘The Office’ without having seen it first,” said Chris Coelen, an executive expanding RDF USA’s Hollywood branch to sell more English formats to U.S. networks. “The Office” began as a radio show and took five years to develop before it aired on British TV.

Though its ratings were modest, the Americanized version won an Emmy for best comedy series of the year and made stars of its cast. “People see the success of a show like that and say, ‘Wow, let’s go out there and try some of this stuff,’ ” Coelen said.

Of course, no one really knows what will work, or how many adaptations will die before the pilot stage.

Hollywood is littered with the corpses of failed remakes of such British shows as “Cracker,” “Men Behaving Badly” and “The Kumars at No. 42.” Fox canceled the 2003 remake “The Ortegas” even before it aired. That same year, NBC pulled “Coupling,” a remake of a British sitcom, after only two weeks.

“What ‘The Office’ has done is make people forget the last 30 years,” said English creator Ricky Gervais in a telephone interview from London. “It’s always been a very precarious process. What do you do? Make it the same and hope people are the same everywhere? What’s the point? Why not show the English version? Or make an American equivalent, keeping the blueprint and the mood the same, which is what we did.”

Executive producer Greg Daniels recalled that in the beginning he was under enormous pressure from people who loved the original, which was airing on BBC America at the time. “All the important people in the field of comedy whose opinion I respected were telling each other no way it could be adapted. I loved it too. I didn’t want to do something that would cause people to hate me.”

The U.S. version of “The Office” was one of the lowest testing pilots NBC executives had ever seen. “Greg Daniels was e-mailing me, saying we got the lowest focus group scores ever. I said, ‘Brilliant, so did we,’ ” Gervais said.

Contrary to popular opinion, “The Office” is not quintessentially English, Gervais said. He said his influences came largely from American comedy: Laurel and Hardy, “The Simpsons,” “This Is Spinal Tap” and “The Larry Sanders Show.”

“American TV is the best TV in the world,” he said. “As far as drama goes, we don’t come close.”

Last month, in fact, U.S. imports like “Monk,” “House,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and “CSI: Miami” have begun airing on some European channels devoted exclusively to American shows.

British producers rarely translate American formats in the same way Americans do, largely because they don’t have similarly sized budgets. “Were we to do ‘The West Wing’ set in No. 10 Downing Street, would we ever achieve what those people have done? Probably not,” said BBC’s Garvie.

In an expanding global marketplace, producers have latched on to content from Latin American countries, notably the telenovela “Yo Soy Betty, la Fea” (ABC’s well-received “Ugly Betty”).

But due to an increase in commercial channels and relaxed marketing rules for independent producers in England, the number of English shows in particular has exploded in recent years.

“There’s a lot of content out there,” Coelen said. And in the U.S., BBC America has served as a screening room for many of those shows. “We used to have to send people over,” said Bob Greenblatt, Showtime’s president of entertainment. “Now we can tune in to BBC America and see stuff.”

Meanwhile, everyone is trying to figure out how “The Office” did it. Maybe it’s keeping the creators involved, or ignoring focus groups.

“If it tests terrible, it’s usually a good sign,” Bromstad said. “Unfortunately, our network bosses don’t always agree.”

Daniels credited the quality of the original, the casting and the fact that he had learned a lesson from “Coupling” not to slavishly follow the original’s scripts. “We decided we would do our original writing immediately after the pilot,” he said.

The fact that Kevin Reilly, NBC’s entertainment president, was a fan of the original didn’t hurt. “We probably would never have done it at NBC if Kevin hadn’t been there,” Daniels said.

The revision is now in its third season, a much longer run than the original. And the Brits are still around. At Daniels’ request, Gervais and Stephen Merchant agreed to collaborate on an episode of the NBC show. It will air Nov. 30.

“I suppose we got homesick for writing ‘The Office,’ ” said Gervais, whose subsequent original series “Extras” airs on HBO. “They wanted us to direct,” he said, “but I thought that was a bit too far. I thought it should be made by Americans for Americans.”

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lynn.smith@latimes.com

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Imported notions

Among British formats in development:

* “Murder Prevention,” to be remade as “Crime Prevention Unit” for ABC.

* “Footballers’ Wives,” to be remade for ABC.

* “Saxondale,” a comedy about a former roadie and a pest exterminator, in development at NBC Studios.

* “Life on Mars,” a time travel cop show, under development at 20th Century Fox Television.

* “Daisy Dooley Does Divorce,” a Bridget Jones-like comedy based on a set of newspaper articles, for ABC.

* “The Vicar of Dibley,” a comedy about a female minister in a small town, as “The Minister of Divine” for Fox.

* “The Thin Blue Line,” a cop comedy, to be adapted by the Wayans brothers.

* “Suburban Shootout,” a “Desperate Housewives”/”Kill Bill” hybrid, for HBO.

* “Little Britain,” a campy sketch comedy series, for HBO.

* “Manchild,” a “Sex and the City” with fortysomething men, for Showtime.

* “Nighty Night,” a dark comedy about a woman who starts dating while her husband is dying, for Showtime.

* “Bad Girls,” a women-behind-bars nighttime soap, for FX.

* “The Bronx Bunny,” a celebrity interview show with raunchy puppets as hosts, for Starz.

* “Viva Blackpool!” a singing detective musical mystery series, for CBS.

* “Creature Comforts,” animated animal interviews, for CBS.

* “Cape Wrath,” a family drama, for Showtime.

* “The Thick of It,” a political comedy, for Sony TV.