The best and worst of US remakes of UK shows

Whenever US TV makers decide to remake a hit UK television show the results can often be mixed.

This Country is the latest programme to be adapted for an American audience.

The US version will be called Welcome to Flatch, and characters Kerry and Kurtan Mucklowe will instead be cousins Kelly and Shrub Mallet.

The new trailer's had a bit of a mixed reaction, so what's the secret to making a British series a hit in America?

"When shows fail, I think it's when they take an idea and don't do anything at all," TV critic and co-host of the Must Watch podcast on BBC Sounds Scott Bryan tells Radio1 Newsbeat.

Scott in his familiar lockdown pose at home

"A lot of remakes are down to US TV makers thinking US audiences won't get it," he explains. "A lot of it is down to the idea, what makes it original."

"The Office UK and the Office US started in similar territory, but the American one really developed into its own show because the creators brought up new ideas.

The US Office won five Emmy awards and launched the careers of several of its stars

Scott's fairly confident the stateside version of This Country could be a hit.

"I think if the jokes and references are on what it is like to grow up in a rural district with the same style of observational style humour, but making it about there, then I think it could work," he says.

Much like This Country, Welcome To Flatch sees TV cameras descend on a remote, fictional town to study the lives of the young people living there.

In the series trailer the two main characters Kelly and Shrub take part in a pan tossing contest, she gets a bad tattoo and the pair try to launch a cab company.

But not all US remakes involving young people work.

Skins ran from 2007 to 2013 and followed a group of friends through a college in Bristol.

Tony, Effy and Maxxie were three of Skins main characters

The show had huge ratings, with many of the actors going on to become big stars.

Fans loved its edginess; it featured a lot of sex, drugs, underage drinking and generally illegal stuff.

There was an appetite for the US version, too. The first episode, airing on MTV, drew in a big crowd.

But it just wasn't as steamy: "Because of concerns around censors and how TV is viewed there, it got watered down a lot," reckons Scott.

"I think the reason why it didn't work in the US was primarily down to the fact that in the UK, they had a young writers room.

"They were writing a lot about what teenagers were into, and of course it was controversial, it did things differently to a lot of TV at the time."

Skins launched the careers of actors like Dev Patel and Joe Dempsie

So ratings plummeted quickly and it was later cancelled.

But caravan staycations, under-18s discos and lads' holidays to Malia could work in America, right?

E4 teen sitcom and Bafta winning series The Inbetweeners was a huge hit in the UK but Scott thinks the cut-and-paste approach for the US version didn't work at all.

"It was unbelievably similar, similar jokes, similar plot, they even had a similar car. It felt like a bad parody," he says.

The show, which aired from 2008 to 2010, was jam-packed full of sexual obscenities and crass humour.

But it didn't go down well in the US or in the UK.

Gavin and Stacey's transatlantic version, 'Us & Them' was set to air on Fox in America.

Gavin and Stacey was the most nominated show in the 2007 British Comedy Awards

They stuck with the names but in the US show Gavin is from New York and Stacey is from Pennsylvania (which in a car is the same distance as Essex to Wales in the British version).

The channel never actually aired it. Instead, a streaming service called Crackle put out the episodes.

Creator James Cordon said in 2016 that the US networks wanted to change the show too much: "They wanted there to be fights all the time between the two families, but our show wasn't about that."

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