The vast wasteland that is television or why do US televsion executives have no sense of humor

I am back. I am almost excited (how excited should a person be by something on television, network television?) because NBC is running two hours of The Office tonight. I missed most of its Tuesday night run earlier. I think that Steve Carrell is very funny, too. It is not as clever or funny as the British series from which it was adapted.

This made me think. This is not some anti-American rant, either, I mean, one of my country's greatest export to the US has been funny people (see Mike Myers, Martin Short, John Candy, Lorne Michaels, Dan Aykroyd, the list goes on with much pride). I just find it funny that the US has tried to adapt a number of funny British comedies without success. Just look at Coupling. I have been watching the orginal, British show on PBS and it is clever and funny. The NBC version, with Rena Sofer, was vapid and plain unfunny. What is up with that?

It is similar to The Office. The British version is much funnier. The NBC version, though it has Steve Carrell, has been dumbed down and sanitized. The character is not as "evil" or "mean", he is just made dumber, so as to excuse his ineptitude or at least rationalize it away. That is not funny. It is just sad.

It reminds of me of the trouble they had making "Animal House". When the concept was pitched to studio executives, of an older generation, they could not see it. They could not figure out why anybody would root for the Deltas. They just could not see the beauty of an anti-hero and the humor derived from it.

Out of fear of tweaking some presumed American sensibility, these clever shows are dumbed down removing the humor as a by-product. It happened with the Jay Mohr series "Action". It was a funny, funny show, though Jay Mohr's character, a Hollywood producer, was not somebody you wanted to succeed, as he was a shit. That was the funny part. It was supposed to be an HBO series but ended up on FOX and did not last long. At least, HBO lets Larry David be Larry David, and that is funny!

That is all for today. Ciao.