Michael Hiltzik writes: To serve this end, American producers become obsessed with making their characters lovable. The idea is to give the audiences characters they’re comfortable welcoming into their homes week after week, year after year. So the rough edges of even the nastiest roles, not to mention the merely offbeat, get sanded down over time. They lose their distinctiveness and become a collection of tics and catchphrases.
Jonathan Lynn, the co-creator and co-writer of “Yes, Minister” and “Yes, Prime Minister” (and director of “My Cousin Vinny”), understood this very well.
“American TV comedy nowadays tends not to be ironic or satirical,” he related. “There is a wish to make it homey and cozy. When I was talking to a network about turning [“Yes, Minister”] into an American series, I was asked if I could put a kid into it — or failing that, a dog. I decided that life is too short.”…
The finite lifespan of British programming gives producers the luxury of retaining and enriching the qualities that make their characters so distinctive without turning them insipid. John Cleese’s Basil Fawlty may occasionally inspire our sympathy, but never do we lose the feeling that it’s Basil’s actions that make things go from bad to worse. When Viacom tried to turn the show into an American sitcom named “Amanda’s” with Beatrice Arthur in the title role, they allowed her to be acerbic like her Maude, but softened her into a California hotel owner more sinned against than sinning. Cleese was aghast. Viacom told him, “We have changed one thing, we’ve written Basil out,” he recalled years later. The show lasted four months in 1983.
Cleese recalled that an earlier attempt to remake “Fawlty Towers” with Harvey Korman and Betty White misfired because the actors “were embarrassed by the edgy dialogue.” That points to another reason why American political sitcoms are so wan next to their British forebears: cowardice…
The makers of American political satires always claim to have devoted close personal study to the workings of Congress and the White House before they set pen to paper, but it’s the Brits who really base their work on real life. “Yes, Minister” and “Yes, Prime Minister” drew heavily from the diaries of former Cabinet minister Richard Crossman. There he wrote of his battles with his own private secretary, the fearsome Dame Evelyn Sharp, who became the prototype for Sir Humphrey Appleby.
The British “House of Cards” has an even finer pedigree: It’s based on a trilogy of novels by Michael Dobbs, who spent 10 years serving Margaret Thatcher as advisor, speechwriter, and “hit man” and used his fiction in part to settle old scores. “The Thick of It,” again, draws its realism by starting with real-life characters, and augmenting them into dramatic types with the skill of expert caricaturists.
But the defining difference is spine. British TV producers actually have more to fear from their political masters than Americans do — the BBC, which broadcast all three of the series we’ve discussed, is after all a government agency. (Government efforts to manipulate the news, by no means unsuccessfully, are a thread running through all three programs.) But as Lynn perceived, the guiding ethos of American producers of political shows seems to be harmlessness. They don’t want to offend the broadest possible audience or those who might make trouble for them in Washington. It’s always safer to be frankly implausible.
British shows have a simpler goal. They want to be funny, and in the process they end up being real.
