Americans to re-make Paths to Freedom
Paths to Freedom is the best Irish comedy of all time in my opinion, not that that is saying too much I suppose, but this remake sounds awful!
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...937953,00.html
Friends find US Path to Freedom
Jan Battles
IT WAS hailed by some as RTE’s best ever comedy: now the Americans want to remake it. Paths to Freedom, the hit series about two criminals who leave Mountjoy prison on the same day, is being adapted for American television by Lisa Kudrow, the actress who played Phoebe in Friends.
Warner Brothers has bought the rights to the format from Grand Pictures, the independent company who made the show for RTE. The American version is being made by Kudrow’s production company and will be based on the original tale of Rats and Jeremy, the main characters in Paths to Freedom.
Like the Irish series, the American translation will feature a working-class criminal along with his posh counterpart and chart the pair’s struggle to reintegrate into society.
The series was a cult hit and garnered critical acclaim when it was shown by RTE in 2001. It starred Michael McElhatton, who also co-wrote the script, as Raymond “Rats” Doyle a small-time con man with pretensions to be a poet and musician and Brendan Coyle as Jeremy, a snobby consultant gynaecologist.
“Lisa has a really fabulous sense of humour. She immediately responded to it when she saw it,” said Peggy Cafferty, an Irish-American producer who optioned the rights to Paths to Freedom from Grand Pictures. After a bidding war with another producer, Kudrow’s company Is or Isn’t Entertainment secured the format rights and hired an American writer to adapt the material. “It’s really exciting because all of these BBC projects have been translated to American television, and this is the first time an Irish television show would be,” said Cafferty.
While the Irish programme was filmed with a hand-held camera as a spoof fly-on-the-wall documentary series, Kudrow’s will be shot with multiple cameras in front of a live studio audience like Friends. There will also be differences in the plot — instead of being a gynaecologist who was convicted for a drink-driving offence Jeremy will be working for a large company where he accidentally gets caught up in an Enron-type white-collar crime. The two ex-cons will also set up home together upon their release and develop an Odd Couple-like relationship.
“Stylistically it is very different,” said Dan Bucatinsky, Kudrow’s producing partner. “This is going to be much more a traditional, multi-camera sitcom. The two gentlemen come out of prison on the same day and become roommates. They are getting back on their feet in society, trying to get their loved ones back in their lives and establish relationships with their kids and get jobs, all while being buddies and living together. They are sort of a modern day Odd Couple.”
Fox television last week commissioned a pilot script from Is or Isn’t Entertainment, which is based on the Warner Brothers lot. The network will decide in May whether to turn the pilot into a full series of 22 episodes for next autumn’s schedule. RTE, which developed the show with Grand Pictures, would be credited along with the independent company on the series and receive a fee when it airs.
“We were all very sceptical when we heard about it first but it’s got to a stage now where it is becoming more and more real,” said Ian FitzGibbon, who wrote the show with McElhatton as well as directing it. “We are delighted that somebody with Lisa Kudrow’s track record and reputation is taking on something that was made over here. When Michael and I made it five years ago it seemed to capture the imagination of the public which was great but we thought that would be the end of it.”
The Irish creators are aware the chances of success on American television are slim. “Only very few get through,” said Michael Garland of Grand Pictures. Remakes of British shows such as Absolutely Fabulous and Fawlty Towers have been failures in America. Last year NBC’s version of the BBC’s Coupling also tanked but its reworking of The Office is having better success and was nominated for a Golden Globe award.
However, FitzGibbon thinks the Irish characters are more recognisable to American audiences. “The characters are very easily transferable if you think of a trailer-trash loser who believes he is going to be the next Eminem and an uptight, waspish surgeon.”
Kudrow set up Is or Isn’t Entertainment with Bucatinsky in late 2003 shortly before she finished her 10-year run playing quirky masseuse Phoebe Buffay in the hit series Friends.
