BBCAmerica... We Will Be Assimilated!

The first and last time I saw Doctor Who was in the 80s. He had this curly mop of hair and the most fantastic scarf I want to knit now. Last weekend, by chance, I noticed that they were showing the first televised season of Dr. Who recorded in 16 years. Christopher Eccleston was our good Doctor (the ninth) and he was, in a word, Fantastic. It turns out he only intended to play The Doctor for a year. David Tennant took his place as the tenth Doctor.

Christopher Eccleston also played Claude, the invisible guy who helps Peter Petrelli in Heroes.

If you want to learn more about Doctor Who, check it oBut here.

Of course, when you watch a different channel, you find yourself paying attention to the other things that are on. So, as of this Saturday, my DVR will be full of Sci-Fi Saturday offerings. First, it will be the next season of Doctor Who. It is not the current season, which shows on the Sci-Fi channel, but it is a way for me to catch up with this new Doctor. Also, I will be watching Torchwood, a spin off of Doctor Who starring Captain Jack Harkness, a fellow who traveled with the Doctor and Rose towards the end of the season.

I've been hearing good things about Jekyll, a series that just ended here.

I am in love with British shows that way. They have short seasons, yet they tell so much story and though they leave you wanting more, it is very satisfying how they end.

But it is more than being able to watch shows like Coupling, Footballers' Wives, Life on Mars. It's also that a lot of these shows are heading stateside, most particularly as American remakes.

One notable show is The Office, which is a remake of a British show of the same name. It took until the end of season 2 and all of season 3 before the American version began to have the same squirm factor as the original, and that squirm factor is what adds to the sense of humour to me. But other shows like Big Brother (not British, but European) and Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares are imports that have proven or will prove successful.

So, in a couple of years, will we see the success of British television translated into American for our viewing pleasure? Coupling was made and canceled after 4 episodes, Life on Mars is slated to be remade, and several shows premiering this fall season owe a debt to their own British show... Viva Laughlin to Blackpool, Life is Wild to Wild at Heart, The IT Crowd, which will be a midseason replacement, to a show of the same name, Life on Mars, Football Wives...

But there is a lot of cancellation as shows that jump the ocean don't always succeed here. Sometimes, the re-creators don't trust the views and take away many of the things that made the shows good in the first place. The Office was lucky enough to have the writers of the original show be writers and producers as well.

The funny thing is, British viewers like American shows and will often import the American remake of their familiar British shows. And for those of us who can understand the accent, if not always the innuendo, we do our own importing of British shows, hoping to catch the original even as we hope the shows are not forever scarred in our mind from their remake.