Are you a fan of the gut-wrenchingly powerful BBC show Broadchurch? Are you sitting down? Okay, deep breaths — Fox just ordered a remade pilot. Set in America. It’s okay. We’re going to get through this. You never know, maybe it’ll be good!
Not all UK-to-US remakes are bad, of course — Sanford and Sons is an American remake of a British show, as is The Office and Elementary, sort of (it isn’t really a remake of Sherlock, but it sure does get to compared to the other series on the regular). But for every Office, there’s an American version of IT Crowd or Skins that just does not work. And with such a dark, heavy show as Broadchurch, which had so much room to breathe and unfold as slowly as possible to allow for maximum levels of drama, the writing is going to need to be Emmy-award-winning levels of good for it to work.
Which it might be, as a matter of fact! Chris Cribnall, the writer of the original Broadchurch series, will be penning the pilot along with Dan Futterman (Capote) and Anya Epstein (In Treatment) as producers. And David Tennant is once again going to take the lead, which may or may not be a good thing. Don’t get us wrong, he’s an amazingly stupendous actor whom we love dearly with all our hearts. but his American accent is kiiinda awful.
No, for real. We’re not kidding about that. This is from his unaired 2009 pilot Rex is Not Your Lawyer (which come on, Rex? You have a character named Rex and you’re telling me he’s not British in some way? Pssh):
Yeah yeah yeah, it might get better. He is an actor, after all, and he is amazing, so maybe he’s worked on the accent since 2009. But personally, I’d rather see him get more amazing while doing something new, not something that he already did perfectly well as a Scot last year.
Of course, I could be persuaded otherwise If he keeps the beard. You know, for… acting purposes. Yes.
Anyway, while the gut reaction here is “no stop making remakes just leave things alone,” this actually might not be so bad. Or it could be very bad. We don’t know, but we’re willing to wait in dread-filled anticipation to find out.
The Broadchurch remake is set to start filming sometime in January. A second season of the actual British show itself is also in the works as well, so no matter what you think about remakes in general, you’re getting more Broadchurch. Hooray!
(via Entertainment Weekly)
- At least we’ve got Tennant in the 50th Whoversary coming up
- As well as that Batman prequel series Fox has optioned
- And, of course, we’ll always have Axe Cop
