Some Shows Are Not Yours to Touch
The Skins remake lasted one season on MTV. One. Advertisers fled after the Parents Television Council complained about a naked teenage boy running down a street—a scene from the E4 original that was heartbreaking and funny and formally perfect. In the American version it was just confusing, stripped of the specific social context that made it land. Cancelled. Gone. As it deserved.
I mention this because Josh Schwartz—the man behind The O.C. and Gossip Girl—has apparently acquired the rights to remake Misfits for American television.
Misfits ran two series on E4. A group of community service delinquents gets jolted by a freak storm into various superpowers—one can reverse time, another makes women want to sleep with him, another reads thoughts. There’s drug use, murder covered up badly, orange jumpsuits, and a kind of bleak British humor that comes from specific geography and class. The third series is coming. I’ve been waiting for it with the kind of low-grade anticipation I don’t often feel anymore.
Now this.
I loved The O.C. once, at a particular age, watching it in the way you watch things that feel like yours for a season and then don’t. Gossip Girl I tried. Rich kids being terrible to each other with excellent hair. Gave up fast. But this isn’t really about Schwartz’s track record—it’s about the logic of the enterprise. What is the actual argument for remaking a show that already works, for an audience that can access the original?
The argument is usually accessibility. American viewers won’t watch British shows because of the accents, the pacing, the cultural references. Which is condescending nonsense. The Wire was set in Baltimore and became internationally beloved because it was good. Misfits is good. People find things that are good.
What actually happens in a remake isn’t adaptation—it’s erosion. Everything distinctive gets filed down until it passes network notes and advertiser approval and a test audience somewhere in California. Then you broadcast the remainder. This is the Skins model. The same mistake, made for the same reasons, by people who never seem to watch what happens next.
There should be a law. Right after whatever article a given civilization uses to establish the dignity of the person, the next line should read: adapt a completed, working, foreign television series and everyone involved gets launched into space. No appeal. Ratified immediately by every nation on earth.
Until that law exists, I’m choosing to believe this falls apart before it gets made. The third series of Misfits is coming, and that’s what I’m holding onto. Everything else—the remakes, the rewrites, the machine that grinds good things into American paste—can deal with itself.
The world wars and financial crises will still be there. One catastrophe at a time.