lost in translation

Okay, Hollywood. We need to talk.

It's really great that you are finally understanding that the BBC does television a lot better than you all do. No one expected that the American version of The Office would rock so much (perhaps even harder than the original), and you are to be applauded for not only for not screwing up a terrific concept, but both improving on it and giving me John Krasinski. If I have not said it before, thanks for that part especially.

However.

I read today that ABC is doing a pilot called Football Wives, clearly based on the delicious British series Footballers' Wive$ and its spinoff, Footballers Wive$: Extra Time. I have sung hosannas to that show on many occasions and there is no guiltier pleasure for me than watching Tanya Turner swish her severe bob or Jason leer over everything with breasts or making rude comments about wussy-ass Donna's awful teeth. Granted, I haven't been as able to get into Extra Time, but as far as I know those characters have yet to bear any hermaphrodite babies or throw Snow White-themed weddings featuring a wedding party composed entirely of little people dressed in breeches. Kids today just don't respect the example of their elders. Elders who are, in any language, fucking awesome:



Anyways, Hollywood, I have a huge problem with your developing this new, weakened adaptation. Exporting a sitcom of mild depression and workplace misery onto America television is not a huge problem, but translating soaps is fraught with peril (much like the unholy extramarital union of Donna and Salvatore Biagi, played by an actor so little affect he could best Hayden Christensen in the International Most Wooden Male pageant). We already have trashy daytime and nighttime soaps in America, and they are filled with impossibly scheming, beautiful men and the bitchy, be-sequined women who scratch them with acrylic nails because they caught the men nailing the babysitter. However, in Footballers' Wive$ we get to SEE him nailing the babysitter. In the bathroom stall of the local club. With full-frontal nudity. And when the wife finds out, first she snorts a big ol' load of coke from her acrylic pinky fingernail before she uses it to claw his eyes out.

Such scenarios obviously cannot happen in America because, unlike the heathen British who clearly want a nation full of sexually active deviant Satanists, America Cares About The Children. Which means our TV shows have no casual and unnecessary nudity, no explicit drug use, no sexual abuse of comatose piggish soccer club owners and (even though Jack Bauer can torture everyone with brown skin in order to save Los Angeles) no woman's breasts have ever caught on fire just for the sheer fun of it. In other words, Hollywood, your TV mostly sucks.

Hollywood, how can you possibly translate the trashabulous glory of Footballers Wive$ to suit the sexually puritanical standards of America, a country that is okay with suspending teenagers for daring to say the word "vagina" in front of other people, lo, the End of Days is nigh?! Tanya Turner practically says "vagina," usually in a less delicate manner, in every other sentence. Right before she'll choke a bitch out.

So I'm already pretty steaming mad over this, Hollywood, but do you know what REALLY frosts my cookies?

You cast James Van Der Beek in the Ian Walmsley role.

James Van Der "Ah. Don't want. Yer life." Beek.

Hollywood, do me a favor. Piss off, eh?