Urgh.

So yeah, the bad news is that the british sitcom Spaced is getting remade as an american show. The good news is that it's being made by Fox, which means it'll only last about four episodes or so before getting cancelled.

As far as I know there's only been one case in history where a british show has been successfully converted by an american network, and that was The Office. The most amusing incident was when a network bought the rights to americanise the show Coupling, not realising that Coupling was just a britishised version of Friends (and not a particularly good one). We now live in a world where television networks are just trading the same retooled ideas back and forth across the atlantic.

The main difference between the remake of The Office and the new Spaced remake is that the creators of the former, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, supported the idea of the american version. It's not the same story here, with Spaced co-creater Edgar Wright coming out with a rather bitchy blog entry where he makes clear that he only heard about the remake through the grapevine, and nobody even approached him to discuss the idea.

If anyone was ever going to miss the point a show like Spaced, two names come to mind. McG, and Will & Grace's Adam Barr; the only two names who have been thus far mentioned in connection with the show. We can all have a pretty good idea of the kind of show they'd see in Spaced, the kind of show they want to make, and to be honest I don't even know why they bothered buying the rights and calling it Spaced.

I'm with Edgar Wright in henceforth referring to the new version as McSpaced.