10 Worst American Adaptations of British TV Shows

While the Britcom Miranda had viewers purring, Call Me Kat got a resounding hiss. Both TV shows follow an awkward woman trying to have it all while pursuing her dreams, but Kat was never as funny as its canned laughter would want us to believe. (At least the three-season show gave more screen time to Swoosie Kurtz and to Leslie Jordan, may he rest in peace.)

Props to the producers of the American Life on Mars for their ambition, taking on a British sci-fi police drama in which a detective is mysteriously transported three decades into the past. But viewers in both the U.S. and U.K. rose in anger about the American version’s ending, which showed that neither the 1973 nor the 2008 storylines were real. Instead, the characters were astronauts on a mission to Mars — in another example of TV titles becoming all too literal.

The U.K. Taskmaster, a panel game in which comedians are challenged to nigh-impossible tasks, has generated a whole pop-culture universe, with books, games, podcasts, and live experiences. The U.S. Taskmaster, however, flopped after just a handful of episodes. The talent was there, but the spark wasn’t, and in a post-mortem interview with PopCulture, original creator Alex Horne said the American version made too many compromises.

You can imagine the puns TV critics made when this Fawlty Towers adaptation turned out to be a humorless disgrace to the British original. John Larroquette followed in John Cleese’s footsteps, playing a hotelier trying to maintain the chaos of his business. (And Larroquette’s character was named Royal Payne.) At least this Payne only persisted for eight episodes.

The United Kingdom’s answer to Friends was Coupling, a Steven Moffat-created sitcom following the love lives of six 30-somethings, played by the likes of Jack Davenport and Gina Bellman. The American version — starring appealing actors like Colin Ferguson, Jay Harrington, and Sonya Walger — should have been much funnier than it was. According to Moffat, it was NBC that “f***ed it up” because the network “intervened endlessly.”

The American Skins rankled conservative viewers with its depictions of teenage drug use and sexual activity — nothing the British original didn’t show or the American Euphoria wouldn’t show years later. But the U.S. version didn’t feature the same in-depth characterization of the original, which captured the comedies and tragedies of suburban adolescence, and thus came off as controversy-bait.

A star-studded Survivor of sorts, I’m a Celebrity has been entertaining British audiences for nearly a quarter-century now, but the American version only eked out two seasons in the 2000s. One issue might have been producers’ loose interpretation of the word “celebrity” — do the names Patti Blagojevich, John Melendez, and Cris Judd ring any bells?

Some of Taika Waititi’s first directing credits were episodes of this American adaptation of a hit Britcom. While the original mined toxic “lad culture” for award-winning humor — it followed four boorish misfits who wouldn’t be in with the Skins crowd — the U.S. version seemed like a pale imitation that forgot to make its core quartet likable.

In the U.K., Men Behaving Badly became a comedy institution of the 1990s, but its Americanization turned audiences off with its depiction of men at their most disgusting. (Said bad behavior includes using dirty underwear for coffee filters, trying to find a new female neighbor’s nude photos, and wondering if it’s OK to continue having sex with a sleeping woman.) One viewer even said she’d “willingly garrote” herself if she thought men really behaved that way.

For every Glee, there’s a Cop Rock, and for every Blackpool, there’s a Viva Laughlin. It’s all too easy to hit the wrong notes when making a musical-dramedy TV show, and unfortunately, American audiences didn’t groove with this song-and-dance-saturated story of an upstart casino in Laughlin, Nevada. Despite the involvement of exec producer and guest star Hugh Jackman, Laughlin had critics laughin’ — at it, not with it.