This article was downloaded by: [Constantine Verevis] On: 01 September 2015, At: 16:11 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: 5 Howick Place, London, SW1P 1WG Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccon20 Transnational television remakes a a Claire Perkins & Constantine Verevis a School of Media, Film and Journalism, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia Published online: 01 Sep 2015. 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Terms & Downloaded by [Constantine Verevis] at 16:11 01 September 2015 Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/termsand-conditions Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 2015 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2015.1068729 SHORT COMMUNICATION Transnational television remakes Claire Perkins and Constantine Verevis* Downloaded by [Constantine Verevis] at 16:11 01 September 2015 School of Media, Film and Journalism, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia This special issue of Continuum seeks to provide a cross-cultural investigation of the current phenomenon of transnational television remakes. Assembling an international team of scholars (from Australia, Germany, Israel, the UK and the USA), this edition draws upon ideas from transnational media and cultural studies to offer an understanding of global cultural borrowings and format translation that extends beyond those approaches that seek to reduce the phenomenon of television remakes simply to one of economic pragmatism. While recognizing the commercial logic of television formats that animates and provides background to these remakes, the collection develops a framework of ‘critical transculturalism’ to describe the traffic in transnational television remakes not as a unitary one-way process of cultural homogenization but rather as an interstitial process through which cultures borrow from and interact with one another (see Smith 2008). More specifically, the essays attend to recent debates around the transnational flows of local and global media cultures to focus on questions in the televisual realm, where issues of serialization and distribution are prevalent. What happens when a series is remade from one national television system to another? How is cultural translation handled across series and seasons of differing length and scope? What are the narrative and dramaturgical proximities and differences between local and other versions? How does the ready availability of original, foreign series (on services such as Netflix Instant and Sky Arts) shape an audience’s reception of a local remake? How does the rhetoric of ‘Quality TV’ impact on how these remakes are understood and valued? In answering these and other questions, this volume at once acknowledges the historical antecedents to transnational trade in broadcast culture – for example, the case of Till Death Us Do Part (UK 1962 – 1974), All in the Family (USA 1972 –1977), and Ein Herz und eine Seele (DE 1973 – 1976) – but also recognizes the global explosion in, and cultural significance of, transnational television remakes since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Although recent years have witnessed a substantial body of critical work devoted to film remakes – Horton and McDougal (1998), Mazdon (2000), Forrest and Koos (2002), Verevis (2006), Loock and Verevis (2012), Smith (2015) – comparatively little has been produced specifically in the area of television. Notable exceptions include Moran (1998), Lavigne and Marcovitch (2011), McCabe and Akass (2013), and a short essay, ‘TV to Film’, in which Constantine Verevis describes the remaking of classic television series (of the 1960s and 1970s) as new theatrical feature films and potential cross-media platforms (2015, 129 – 30). This cycle of remakes – which has precursors throughout the 1970s and 1980s – intensifies with the critical and commercial success of The Addams Family (1991), *Corresponding author. Email: con.verevis@monash.edu q 2015 Taylor & Francis Downloaded by [Constantine Verevis] at 16:11 01 September 2015 2 C. Perkins and C. Verevis and includes other feature films of the 1990s remade from past television series: The Fugitive (1993), The Beverly Hillbillies (1993), The Flintstones (1994), Maverick (1994), The Brady Bunch Movie (1995), Mission: Impossible (1996) and The Mod Squad (1999). The cycle of television-to-film transfers continues through to the present with movies such as 21 Jump Street (2012), but appears to find its apotheosis in the release of Charlie’s Angels (2000), the television feature developed from the five-season Aaron Spelling television series, Charlie’s Angels (ABC 1976 – 1981). Charlie’s Angels (2000) went on to transfer the serial methods of television not only to its sequel – Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003) – but also extended the franchise through a remade – or ‘rebooted’ – US television series, Charlie’s Angels (2011). Less well known, however, is that Charlie’s Angels had already been remade as Àngeles, a 13-episode Spanish-language remake which aired on Mexico’s Telemundo in 1999. Although there is no shortage of American television remakes of US tele-series – recent, high profile examples include Melrose Place (1992 – 1999/2009– 2010), Hawaii 5-0 (1968 –1980/2010), and Dallas (1978 – 1991/2012) – it is specifically to cases of transnational television remakes – examples such as Àngeles – that this volume turns its attention. In a brief account of the history of media globalization, one that traces international trade in formats to the early days of broadcast radio, Hilmes (2013) provides background to an investigation of contemporary transnational television remakes. Specifically, in and through an investigation of the transnational trajectory of the Betty format – a TV series that marks ‘a unique moment in the globalisation of broadcast television, [one that has found] remarkable success from nation to nation . . . in more than 33 languages and across virtually every geographical region’ (26) – Hilmes proposes ‘four distinct types of transnational productions’ that characterize television in the new millennium. These are (1) imported series, (2) adapted series, (3) format fiction and (4) reality formats (35). Although Hilmes immediately qualifies the typology – acknowledging both the overlap between the categories and the fact that the Betty example fits several categories simultaneously – these groupings nonetheless provide a point of entry to the various discussions of contemporary transnational and cross-cultural television remakes that are undertaken in this special issue of Continuum. The first of Hilmes’ transnational television categories – imported series – describes those programmes that are sold internationally: ‘produced in one national context and broadcast “as is” in a new national context’ (2013, 35). Elsewhere Hilmes provides a list of some of the most highly rated and longest running (that is, more than 100 broadcast episodes) examples of US television series that aired in the UK (divided almost equally between BBC and ITV) in the 1960s and 1970s: The Beverley Hillbillies, Bewitched, The Big Valley, The Bionic Woman, Charlie’s Angels, I Dream of Jeannie, Ironside, Kojak, M*A*S*H, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Mission: Impossible, The Muppet Show, My Three Sons, Police Woman, The Six Million Dollar Man, Star Trek and Starsky and Hutch (2012, 265 –274). In such instances – where the production is national, but the circulation is transnational – each television series is ‘remade’ – that is, dispersed and transformed – in its every new context through operations such as dubbing and subtitling, and also through scheduling, advertising sales and promotion strategies. In Australia, non-English language imports – such as Forbrydelsen (Denmark/Norway/Sweden/DE 2007– 2012) and Broen/ Bron (Denmark/Sweden/DE 2011) – are typically sub-titled and screened on the second national public broadcaster, SBS. Although this type of remaking is not the primary focus of essays in this volume, it is a practice that finds some limited expression throughout. Lothar Mikos, for instance, begins his essay on the Stromberg (DE 2004 –2012) remake of The Office (UK 2001– 2003) by describing a history of German importation and Downloaded by [Constantine Verevis] at 16:11 01 September 2015 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 3 broadcasting of US and UK series that extends from examples such as 77 Sunset Strip (USA 1958– 1964) and The Avengers (UK 1961 –1969) thorough Dallas (USA 1978 – 1991) and Dynasty (retitled Denver-Clan, USA 1981 –1989), and on to The Sopranos (USA 1999– 2007) and Sherlock (USA/UK 2010 – ) in the new millennium. A second category – reality formats – describes those genres of television – quiz shows, game shows and lifestyle programmes – that are remade ‘in such a way as to change virtually every element of the show except the central organising concept’ (Hilmes 2013, 35). The proliferation of these formats – in examples such as Big Brother, Next Top Model and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? – has led to both the formalization and regulation of the movement of programme ideas from one place to another, and now involves the preparation of a so-called ‘production Bible’, or set of legal guidelines which provide copyright protection for all aspects of the programme. In Copycat TV, Albert Moran defines these television formats as ‘an interconnected parcel of particular knowledges that will be galvanised in the production, financing, marketing and broadcasting of a TV program’ (1998, 25). In his contribution to this volume, ‘Television format traffic – public service style’, Moran extends these ideas to three ‘live’ programme format transfers that transpired cross-culturally, between the UK and Australia in the 1960s. Investigating the ‘information/educational continuum’, Moran looks to the case of two current affairs programmes: Panorama (BBC 1953 –), a studio-based, magazine type programme that was initially shown on the Australian public service broadcaster (ABC 1957 –1961) before being remade as the ‘local equivalent’ current affairs programme, Four Corners (1961 –); and the UK’s Tonight (BBC 1957 –1965), a daily ‘short-form’ current affairs programme that was remade as This Day Tonight for the TEN network, beginning in Sydney in 1965. Moran’s third example of format transfer is the children’s television programme Play School (BBC 1964 – 1988), remade in Australia as the longrunning Play School (ABC 1966– ). Moran concludes that programme remaking was – and is – a fact of television’s institutional need for content rather than simply one of cultural imperialism. For Hilmes, these two categories – imported series and reality formats – can be understood as extremes – of sameness and difference – along a continuum of television adaptation and remaking. Between these poles are two further categories – adapted series and format fiction – that Hilmes describes as remake types that ‘legally, and pragmatically, adhere to the conventions of the traditional text (the unified expression of an author/owner)’ but when sold as adaptable, serial properties for global television are transformed in sometimes unpredictable and ‘boundary-testing’ ways (2013, 37). Hilmes further divides these adapted series into ‘creative’ and ‘controlled’ (or ‘free’ and ‘faithful’) categories of adaptation. The first describes instances of television series – such as The Office (UK 2001– 2003/USA 2005– 2013), Life on Mars (UK 2006 –2007/USA 2008 – 2009/La chica de ayer, Spain 2009) and Wilfred (AU 2007 –2010/USA 2011 – ) – wherein ‘the adapting company pays the rights to a program originated in another national context, then changes what it needs in order to effect a version that will, it hopes, do better than the original would in the home market’ (2013, 38). The degree of transformation varies substantially from one case to another, but when accomplished successfully the programme’s origins are masked so well that viewers are unlikely to even notice that the show is a remake of a programme that was created in another country. In contrast, the variant of adapted series that Hilmes calls ‘controlled’ is exemplified by Paris Enquêtes Criminelles (Paris Criminal Investigations, FR 2007– ) and Law & Order UK (UK 2009 –), versions of Law & Order: Criminal Intent (USA 2001– 2011) that were closely overseen by the parent production company, Wolf Films, so as to protect the brand and franchise in Downloaded by [Constantine Verevis] at 16:11 01 September 2015 4 C. Perkins and C. Verevis the international community. Finally, Hilmes finds in the ‘amazingly protean’ example of the transnational phenomenon of the Betty format, something that sits between adapted series and reality format: a format fiction that ‘lend[s] discrete parts of its textual universe to creative reworkings in an astonishing variety of settings, while still maintaining a celebrated attachment to the parent series’ (2013, 40). The example of Betty demonstrates that – whatever methodological value a taxonomic approach brings to understanding serially conceived and mass-produced television texts – such an approach must cede to in situ analyses that attend to the (historically) specific industrial, textual and critical factors of each case. The essays collected here provide a range of such analyses through the examination of transnational television traffic between nations including Australia, Denmark, Sweden, Israel, Germany, the UK and the USA. While taking individual approaches and drawing distinct conclusions on what these case studies show about contemporary transnational television remaking, the essays do share a broad common methodology in that each one attends to the issue that is flagged in the title of Jennifer Forrest and Sergio Martı́nez’s piece: remapping socio-cultural specificity. The implicit conclusion that can be drawn from this shared attention is that the imperative to reshape the social and cultural profile of a television series is – for producers – more pressing in the case of television than of film. Again, this is a point that is directly stated in the set-up for Forrest and Martı́nez’s essay, when they claim that in contrast with film remakes, what relative narrative parity between original and remake can be sustained for two hours becomes difficult to sustain for . . . a television series, even more so when the social, cultural, and historical character of the transposed landscape is rich and complex. In and through the arguments advanced in the assembled essays of this volume, three primary – though often overlapping – focalizations on this transposition emerge. The first centres on the specifically political effects and implications of socio-cultural remapping. With this focus, adapted narratives are analysed with primary attention to the commentary that the process of transposition makes on the political issues, values and priorities of the destination nation. The approach is centrally evident in the essays by Forrest and Martı́nez and Anat Zanger, which respectively examine how US remakes – The Bridge (2013) and Homeland (2011) – transform the original premise of their Swedish/Danish and Israeli hypotexts into specifically American political narratives. In ‘Remapping socio-cultural specificity in the American remake of The Bridge’, Forrest and Martı́nez demonstrate how this transformation takes shape via a reversal of story priorities: that is, how the ‘social scourges’ of the remapped series ultimately come to the fore over its personal vendetta plot, and thus advance a representation of the drug trafficking, migrant smuggling and murder of young women that make up the social realities of the US-Mexico border. In the latter piece – ‘Between Homeland and Prisoners of War: remaking terror’ – Zanger shows how the different historical production periods and reception spaces of the series generate two distinct trauma narratives. Here, the American version recasts the Israeli series’ concern with the legitimacy and aftermath of prisoner exchanges into a diegesis centring on the collective trauma of 9/11, and a dramatic narrative that seeks to understand it. This political focalization is also evident in Kim Akass’ ‘The show that refused to die: the rise and fall of AMC’s The Killing’. As part of a discussion of how processes of convergence and digitization are rapidly changing the global television landscape, Akass examines how The Killing modifies the haphazard but unproblematic parenting of the Danish Forbrydelsen into a hostile narrative denigration of Downloaded by [Constantine Verevis] at 16:11 01 September 2015 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 5 ‘selfish’ maternity that becomes increasingly darker as The Killing moves from the basic cable environment of AMC to the freer conditions of Netflix. Akass’ essay identifies how this narrative shift provides a telling commentary on America as ‘a country with some of the worst maternity benefits of the Western World’. A second focalization shows how socio-cultural remapping in television remakes creates and comments upon specifically generic effects, with authors attending to how semantic and syntactic markers work to provide both continuity and difference across transnational versions. This is evident in Moran’s aforementioned discussion of the ‘live’ genres of current affairs and children’s television, and also in Lothar Mikos’ ‘From The Office to Stromberg: adaptation strategies in German television’, an essay that takes this approach to investigate how the British social realist/comedy verité mockumentary becomes, in Germany, a classical sitcom. Mobilizing the pair of programmes to demonstrate the necessity of adapting setting, plot, dramaturgy and aesthetics in a German remake of a fictional series, Mikos shows how Stromberg (2004 –2010) sustains the documentary style of The Office (2001 –2003) but moulds this into the straighter conventions of the classic US sitcoms that German viewers have been schooled in, thus demonstrating how the remake ‘follows traditions that have developed over the history of German culture’. Sue Turnbull’s ‘Trafficking in TV crime: remaking Broadchurch’ also makes questions of genre central to its investigation of how the American Gracepoint (2014) remaps the original British series (2013). Drawing on the centrality of genre to the concept of cultural proximity, Turnbull uses this case study to directly ask a question that is fundamental to the issue as a whole namely, ‘why remake?’ She concludes that, when read against the niche success of original British crime drama in America, the failure of Gracepoint to find an American audience is evidence of an argument against cultural proximity. Here, viewers are able to enjoy an original series as a form of tourism, because their familiarity with the crime genre ‘compensate[s] for the lack of familiarity with the setting and cultural context’. The third point of focalization to emerge from the collection’s study of socio-cultural remapping centres on the issue of cultural value. The contributors who take this approach show how the process of transposition works in with issues around ‘quality’ television and its contexts and discourses. These arguments both challenge and support historically dominant ideas on remaking as a negative form of cultural imperialism. In essays that both centre on the place and function of national public broadcasters, Janet McCabe and Constantine Verevis, respectively, consider how the examples of Wallander (on the British BBC) and The Slap (on the Australian ABC) speak to the cultural profile and public service responsibilities of each network in an era of global television production and consumption. In ‘Appreciating Wallander at the BBC: producing culture and performing the glocal in the UK and Swedish Wallanders for British public service television’, McCabe argues that the appearance of original and remake on the same network is evidence of a deliberate curatorial strategy on the part of the BBC. Tracing how the various performances of Kurt Wallander are positioned at the Corporation, McCabe argues that it is the spaces opened up ‘in between’ the texts that work to support the distinctive BBC brand of national culture, which involves ‘drawing connections between different platforms and services, the complex differences of countries and societies [and] different national interpretations and aesthetic styles’. In this evaluation, it is the institutional experience of the versions alongside one another that is endowed with quality in the form of symbolic capital. Verevis’ essay – ‘“Whose side are you on?” The Slap (2011/2015)’ – attends to how the construction and reception of the original series as a quality product in Australia impacted upon audience expectations of the American Downloaded by [Constantine Verevis] at 16:11 01 September 2015 6 C. Perkins and C. Verevis NBC remake. As a series based on a best-selling, critically acclaimed novel that takes a complex and authentic perspective on a multicultural Australian middle class, The Slap triggered assumptions worldwide that a version remade to fit the conventions and requirements of US network television would inevitably be inferior. As Verevis shows, the discourses surrounding the anticipation of a US remake in this way demonstrate the hierarchies of value that surround transnational television traffic, and through this point to the importance of considering whether format adaptation contributes to the concept of quality television or reinforces the sense that the market is lacking in originality and new ideas. Finally, and in a different perspective on the connection between socio-cultural remapping and cultural value, Claire Perkins’ ‘Translating the television treatment genre: Be’Tipul and In Treatment’ takes up the case of a series remade by and for HBO as the long-established site for quality television in the USA. Arguing that the ‘genre’ of quality television discursively linked to this network is, in the millennial era, defined by a narrative focus on the complex dynamics of attempted or achieved transformation, Perkins demonstrates how the Israeli Be’Tipul is remapped to fit this mould. Tapping into sociological debates around therapeutic culture in America, In Treatment gradually diverges from the open-ended style of the original series to present unambiguous narratives of transformation towards both enlightened and vulnerable ends, and in this way presents a particularly stark example of the contemporary ‘brand’ of US quality television, and its cultural power. These three points of focalization – politics, genres and value – animate the essays herein and provide a structure for the organization of the volume as a whole, but they also overlap and interrelate. That is, these three areas of investigation provide not only a line through each cluster of essays but indicate also a set of connections between them. Tellingly, it is – as McCabe astutely points out in her essay – exactly this ‘in-betweenness’ that can offer a broader, overarching theme for the volume: namely, the provision of a space for placing television texts in a relationship with one another and facilitating a transtextual interpretation. It is in the spirit of providing (to paraphrase McCabe) a space not only for analysing creative works, but also for encouraging creative work, that this special issue on transnational television remakes seeks to make a contribution. Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank the following people for their input and assistance, which has greatly aided in the production of this special ‘Transnational television remakes’ issue of Continuum: Gunhild Agger, John Alberti, Sylvaine Bataille, Susan Bye, Florence Cabaret, Andrea Esser, Jeffrey Griffin, Kathleen Loock, Radha O’Meara, Tom O’Regan, Iain Robert Smith and Terrie Waddell. A special word of thanks to each one of our contributors: working with you has been a rewarding experience and a pleasure. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. Notes on contributors Claire Perkins is Lecturer in Film and Screen Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. She is the author of American Smart Cinema (Edinburgh UP, 2012) and co-editor of US Independent Film After 1989: Possible Films (Edinburgh UP, 2015), B Is For Bad Cinema: Aesthetics, Politics and Cultural Value (SUNY P, 2014), Film Trilogies: New Critical Approaches (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and the forthcoming Indie Reframed: Women Filmmakers and Contemporary American Independent Cinema (Edinburgh UP). Her writing has also appeared in international journals Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 7 including Camera Obscura, Critical Studies in Television, Celebrity Studies and The Velvet Light Trap. Constantine Verevis is an Associate Professor in Film and Screen Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. He is the author of Film Remakes (Edinburgh UP, 2006) and co-author of Australian Film Theory and Criticism, Vol. I: Critical Positions (Intellect, 2013). His co-edited volumes include Second Takes, Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel (SUNY P, 2010); After Taste, Cultural Value and the Moving Image (Routledge, 2011); Film Trilogies, New Critical Approaches (PalgraveMacmillan, 2012); Film Remakes, Adaptations and Fan Productions, Remake/Remodel (PalgraveMacmillan, 2012); B Is for Bad Cinema, Aesthetics, Politics and Cultural Value (SUNY P, 2014);US Independent Film After 1989: Possible Films (Edinburgh UP, 2015). Downloaded by [Constantine Verevis] at 16:11 01 September 2015 References Forrest, Jennifer, and Leonard R. Koos, eds. 2002. Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Hilmes, Michele. 2012. Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting. New York: Routledge. 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