"It's probably something else"
By Steven Lloyd Wilson | Posted Under Trailers | Comments (36)
“Being Human” is a fantastic British horror series about three flat mates who happen to be a werewolf, a vampire, and a ghost. Now after only two series of it, the powers that be have determined that it’s about time for an American remake. Which totally makes sense because like British people talk funny and stuff. It’s debuting on SyFy on January 17th, so I suppose to distinguish it from the British version, I’ll just call it “Beyng Humyn” from now on. Here’s the trailer for it:
Ok, fine it doesn’t look bad, per se. But they’ve got an utterly no win situation here, playing out on two axes: similarity and quality. If it’s similar and shitty they look like idiots. If it’s dissimilar and shitty they really look like idiots. If it’s similar and good, it’s pointless. And if it’s dissimilar and good, one questions why they couldn’t have come up with a different name in the first place. There are in fact many words in both British and American other than the two in this title.
Me, I’m taken with the original, if only because the cast was at Comic-Con last year, and they were the most fun of any panel I went to. You couldn’t have scripted a better hour of sniping, verbal jabs, and raw chemistry between the actors. One of the highlights was the show runner explaining that the show was not originally supposed to be supernatural at all, but was just supposed to be a comedy about three flatmates. Finally after endless meetings of being unable to get anywhere with writing a story, he said at the final meeting before the whole thing was just going to get scrapped: “why don’t we just make George a werewolf? At the very least it’ll give us something to do in the first episode.”
Here’s the first part of that panel (there are four parts total and I believe they link from the end of each).
I’d never bothered with tracking down the DVDs until I read this quote from the show, Mitchell (the vampire) narrating George’s transformation into a wolf:
“He should be dead within 30 seconds. The werewolf heart is about two-thirds the size of a human’s. But in order to shrink, first it has to stop. In other words, he has a heart attack. All of the internal organs are smaller, so while he’s having his heart attack, he’s having liver and kidney failure too. If he stops screaming it’s not because the pain has dulled, his throat, gullet and vocal chords are tearing and reforming. He literally can’t make a sound. By now the pituitary gland should be working overtime, flooding his body with endorphins to ease some of the pain, but that too has shut down. Anyone else would have died of shock long ago. But it won’t kill him and that’s the thing I find most remarkable. It drags him through the fire and keeps him alive and even conscious to endure every second. Nothing like this could just evolve. This… is the fingerprint of God. An impossible lethal curse spread by tooth and claw, victim begets victim begets victim. It’s so cruel, it’s… perfect.”
I just can’t wait to see how they Americanize it! The bright side is that for every time a British show gets unnecessarily Americanized there’s another year’s delay before the inevitable “Doctor Who” Americanization. It’s true. It’s in the Constitution and the Magna Carta.
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Comments
Posted by: coveredinbees at January 4, 2011 11:10 AM
Ugh, Annie has, like, the exact same sweater? Russell Tovey. . .RUSSELL TOVEEEEEEEY!!