Fear Mars

One of the consequences of the failure of the 1996 TV Movie is that it probably innoculated the series against the most common way for UK television series to transfer to the US -- the American remake.

I was reminded by this on the news that Doctor Who writer Matthew Graham's primary series, Life on Mars, is getting an American remake for ABC for the fall of 2007.

Doctor Who is probably too well known at this point to have had the obvious American remake for the new series. Would lots of planets have a Brooklyn? Would you remake The Unquiet Dead and set it in St Louis or New Orleans with Mark Twain instead of Charles Dickens?

One of the problems with the 1996 TV Movie is that you really don't get a solid scope of the series in the one story. You don't really have an idea about what a story set in a historical setting would have been like, or what something in the future would have been like.

While there have been other Sci Fi shows with a similar sense of whimsy as Doctor Who, they've all really been international productions like Farscape, Lexx, or Xena.

Thankfully, Doctor Who is being imported -- not remade -- for this market. But I think the exercise of trying to figure out how one might remake Doctor Who from scratch for an American market is an interesting one if it brings some different ideas about what is truly essential in the Doctor Who concept.

(I've got general thoughts on Life on Mars at my Train of Thought.)