The Guardian informs me this lunchtime that the Americans are getting the opportunity to watch Forbrydelsen, probably the only piece of television ever made that approaches the enjoyment of a good book.
Tense, grim, dark, beautifully written, tightly plotted, perfectly cast and impeccably played, it is a slow-burning, low-action, emotionally searing twenty-hour stretch of devastating bleakness, confusion and long, long silences, chillingly photographed blackness, rain, more rain and the best bad Christmas sweater in history.
It is a hymn to the fucked-up pointlessness of existence.
It is painfully European.
It stars Sofie Gräbøl as Sarah Lund.
It's all in Danish with subtitles.
I hate television and yet I spent two hours at a time for ten consecutive weeks sitting in the dark on Saturday nights glued to BBC4, marvelling at the quality of the writing and acting and cinematography.
And at the lack of ad breaks.
Then I read a little more of the Guardian article only to find that the Americans have - brace yourself - "remade" it as a cop show set in Seattle.
Different actors, different plot, different killer and different ending.
What the fuck?
I am assured by my American friends that they are quite capable of reading subtitles, so the question remains: why?
Why this obsession with finding something good - in this case sensationally so - and then remaking it as an inferior product?
Because it's set in Denmark?
Surely not. I mean Sarah Palin might be frightened by the concept of Denmark; she may believe København is a continent containing Africa but I'm damned sure most of you can cope without screaming when a movie or a television programme is set outside the borders of the USA.
Why, why, why?
Please excuse me while I bang my head against my desk for a minute …
Ow …
I mean look what they did to Fawlty Towers! The Office! The Italian Job! Get Carter (AUGH)! The Ring, Vanilla Sky, Godzilla, Diabolique (for fuck's sake), Point Of No Return/Nikita, Solaris, Taxi … the list goes on drearily. They even renamed The Madness of George III "The Madness of King George" in case dumbfucks thought it was a a sequel.
Okay, so maybe they got it almost right with The Magnificent Seven, though it's still not a patch on The Seven Samurai, but the exception only proves the rule.
America makes really good original TV shows: witness M.A.S.H. Frazier, Buffy, The Simpsons, The Sopranos, but let them loose on something wonderful from across the pond and they fuck it up. Badly.
Listen up, US TV executives:
It ain't broke. Don't - whatever you do - try in your cack-handed way to fix it. LEAVE IT ALONE! Trust your fellow Americans to be in possession of sufficient brain cells to grasp the concept of the world outside your borders.
Here's a little piece of advice that I do hope any Colonials reading this will take. You will thank me for it, I'm sure.
Do not - under any circumstances - watch the US remake of Forbrydelsen ("The Killing"). It might be a good cop show but it is not Forbrydelsen any more than Forbrydelsen is a cop show based in Seattle. The original boxed set is available on DVD (yes, of course I have it). Buy it. Watch it. Marvel at it. Read the fucking subtitles.
Message ends.
