The problem with American remakes of British shows

Matt Zoller Seitz @ Salon.com says that the planned NBC version of the brilliant "Prime Suspect" shows why network TV shouldn't mess with great imports.

 

Prime Suspect, Jane Tennison (Helen Mirren)

Pictured: Maria Bello as Det. Jane Timoney

The idea of remaking the story of Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison (Helen Mirren) for American network TV seems wrongheaded. The problem is the venue. The U.S. broadcast TV model -- with its 42-minutes-a-week, 22-weeks-a-year format, frequent commercial interruptions, and still-oppressive content restrictions -- is the enemy of every fine quality that the original "Prime Suspect" possessed.

 

More important, American TV is averse to letting race, class, politics and other touchy elements drive stories because it might make viewers and sponsors skittish. That's why the American crime show's favorite bad guy is the serial killer, a mythologically exaggerated monster whose existence lets filmmakers titillate and terrify while declining to engage with society at large.

Jane Tennison never dealt with effete, wisecracking, Hannibal Lecter-type bogeymen. She lived in reality. Over 15 years,"Prime Suspect" dealt frankly with sex, sexism, race, class and the intrusion of politics into police work. It did so subtly, prizing plausibility and never delivering a jolt without reason. And it treated time as an ally instead of an enemy. One of the pleasures of "Prime Suspect" was the opportunity to re-engage with it after a long break and discover that Tennison had risen in rank or settled into a new job or a new relationship. The gaps between installments enhanced the sense that you were seeing excerpts from a life in progress. 

 

You can't do any of that on NBC. You can't re-create or even approximate "Prime Suspect" in a commercial broadcast network series that airs 22 episodes a year. The material can't breathe in the same way. And forget about being unflinching. What passes for unflinching on NBC is "Law & Order: Criminal Intent," an entertaining but mostly absurd procedural that bears about as much qualitative relation to "Prime Suspect" as "Training Day" does to "Serpico." And don't even get me started on TNT's "The Closer," a fitfully entertaining series that has wrongheadedly been described as an American answer to "Prime Suspect," presumably because its main character is a strong-willed female detective. (It's not a subtle psychological drama, it's a suck-up-to-the-star spectacle about a mercurial Southern belle following her muse and dazzling the nonbelievers. "Prime Suspect" writes in plain script, "The Closer" in big block letters.) Not many American cop shows, broadcast or cable, have engaged with reality as directly as "Prime Suspect" -- and the best of those were produced not in Hollywood, but in Baltimore:  "Homicide: Life on the Street," "The Corner," and "The Wire."

 

My friend Keith Uhlich, a Time Out New York film critic and a devotee of series TV, has a theory that broadcast network shows provide viewers with two sources of drama. One is the conflict between characters. The other is the conflict between the series and the system that produces it.

When we watched the Fox network series "The X-Files," for example, the main draw was Fox Mulder and Dana Scully vs. a vast and unknowable conspiracy. The secondary draw was series creator Chris Carter and company vs. the Fox network and the network TV assembly line generally. Every time you watched that series -- or "NYPD Blue," or "Lost," or "24" or "ER" any other U.S. network program of note -- there was an extra-dramatic sense of anticipation. You wanted to see if the writers would manage to transcend network content restrictions, format limitations, behind-the-scenes meddling by executives and sponsors -- not to mention the pitiless pressure of having to churn out 22 episodes a year even if they didn't have enough stories to justify it -- and produce great TV. Or just good TV.

Judge for yourself: