An American Export Success Story : In Europe, Australia and Russia, popular American series are being recast and re-shot as home-grown programming. In many cases, audiences don’t have a clue

The rangy former soccer star-turned-housekeeper waltzes blithely into the bathroom, towel in hand, and stops dead in his tracks. His boss--a leggy advertising executive, normally high-powered but considerably less so reclined stark naked in her bath--lets out a scream that would have undone the starchiest of her boarding school matrons. He retreats, she scrambles for cover, glaring. The laugh track explodes.

If there’s an odd sense of deja vu to this scene, it’s for good reason. Substitute a stockier Tony Danza as an ex-baseball player and Judith Light as a Madison Avenue advertising executive and “Who’s the Boss?” comes clearly into focus.

In Britain, across Europe, Australia and even Russia, American television series are being resurrected, recast and re-shot as home-grown programming. “Who’s the Boss?” becomes “Ein Job fur Leben” on RTL in Germany and “The Upper Hand” on ITV’s Channel 3 in Britain. “Maude” turns up in France 2 as “Maggie.” Italian viewers tune into “L’Ultimo Minuto,” oblivious to the fact that “Rescue 911” is the American precursor.

“Sesame Street” is transferred from a Brooklyn brownstone to a train station in its Norwegian adaptation and to a bazaar in the Arab version--two of the 14 different international takes on the PBS children’s series. And in Russia and Australia, audiences shadow investigative reporters copied directly from “60 Minutes.”

This latest wave of American television exports is reformatted , as opposed to dubbed programs. They use local actors and sets and are shot from the original scripts, which have been translated and adapted by local writers and producers. In many cases, audiences have not a clue that they are watching recycled clones of American shows.

“If ‘The Upper Hand’ were a car,” offers the show’s producer, Christopher Walker, in an irresistible metaphor, “it looks and feels British and drives like a British car, but under the hood is a huge American V-8 engine. It’s the engineering that’s American, the pace and the drive that moves the stories along. The factories out in Hollywood producing these shows know what they’re all about. We’re benefiting from that engineering.”

For years, the flow had been in the opposite direction, with U.S. television producers liberally adapting British series--”Man About the House” became “Three’s Company,” “Till Death Do Us Part” turned into “All in the Family” and “Steptoe and Son” was reborn as “Sanford and Son.”

Several years ago, however, Walker began casting about for new series for Britain’s ITV network, the largest private television chain, and wound up in Hollywood. “Without making any bones about it,” he says from his London studio, “there was a dearth of new concepts here. Let’s be honest: If we were brimming with wonderful, comic ideas, we would not have bothered hopping on a plane to go looking elsewhere.”

Walker settled on “Who’s the Boss?” because of its class and ethnic conflicts, its sexual tensions and the flight from the inner city that motivates the Danza character--all elements with which British audiences could intuitively identify. “It also had kids in pivotal roles,” he explains, “and this was especially appealing since it was so rare for British sitcoms.”

“The Upper Hand” has scored an enormous success, garnering 10 million viewers every week for the past 3 1/2 years, frequently making it the No. 1 situation comedy in the country.

Long pilloried by the guardians of European culture but lapped up by the European consumer, dubbed U.S. television series have been slipping of late. Local audiences no longer sit rapt watching the antics of characters, plots and sets that may be light years from their daily lives and concerns. For just these reasons, reformatted shows have been surging forth like velociraptors.

“There’s no question that reformatting has been growing exponentially over the past few years,” says Paul Bricault, a Los Angeles-based media analyst with Paul Kagan Associates. “A good ballpark guess would be that it accounts for at least $60 million-$70 million of the total $1 billion of overseas television sales.

“There are a number of reasons for this growth. Dubbed American series are no longer scoring the best ratings and European broadcasters that are now making substantial revenues can afford to develop programming.”

Another less obvious incentive is that reformatted shows neatly sidestep European quotas for American-produced series. In France, for example, 60% of programs must be produced in Europe. Since the reformatted series qualify as European productions, they enable European broadcasters to air American-style programs without filling their quotas. At the same time, American distributors benefit from extending the market longevity--not to mention the profit margins--of American series that might otherwise be restricted.

Depending on your point of view, this reformatting phenomenon is either the latest glove across the face or the great video hope, a bridge enabling fledgling local programming to gain its footing.

“They are the first step in national production,” says Nicholas Bingham, president of Columbia-TriStar International Television. “They help develop an industry which can obviously compete with American imports.”

Columbia-TriStar is among the most active reformatters, licensing “Married . . . With Children,” “Who’s the Boss?” and “Maude,” among other series. Other major packagers include NBC, CBS, the Dutch company Endemol Entertainment, Monaco-based Grundy Worldwide and U.S. games developer Fremantle International.

“Reformatting is a very important part of our strategy,” Bingham explains. “We cannot expect to remain exporters of American programs forever; we need to become more involved in promoting local productions.”

“Sesame Street” has been reformatting its shows for 20 years, and its 14 international editions appear in 30 different countries. The American producers studiously avoid any hint of cultural or religious bias--down to eliminating U.S. cars and flags--and collaborate with local broadcasters on matching the educational focus of the shows to each country’s school curriculum.

“In Germany, the emphasis is on cognitive learning, numbers and math,” explains “Sesame Street’s” Baxter Urist. “But next door in Holland, the Dutch concentrate on Dutch culture. They want to ensure that recent immigrants understand the language of their adopted country.”

Formatting setups vary genre to genre and country to country. Game show adaptations, for example, are the most straightforward, sitcoms the most problematic. King World’s “Wheel of Fortune” airs in 25 countries with very little variation. “We provide the local broadcasters with what we call the bible,” explains King World president Fred Cohen, “and they follow the game plan--how to get contestants, the questions, etc. Once the show is up and running, we check it every few months to insure they’re adhering to our production values. It’s much like being a master licensee for Benetton or McDonald’s.”

Reality shows generally undergo more radical surgery. CBS’ hour-long “Rescue 911” appears in Italy as a three-hour marathon titled “L’Ultimo Minuto,” with the original protagonists of the dramatized re-creation brought in for live interviews before a studio audience. “It has the look and feel of a variety show as much as a reality show,” says James Warner, president of CBS Enterprises. “That’s the custom; that’s what Italians are used to watching.

“Typically on these shows, we change the title, provide access to all of our segments, provide production expertise. We encourage our clients to find a local host and produce their local segments. Some countries dub our segments, some subtitle them, using the same video shot in the U.S. Their segments mirror ours so they all seem to have come from the same source.

“For CBS, reformatting is definitely growing. From our standpoint, it’s the most effective way to market the reality programming that has taken hold internationally. Overseas broadcasters are looking for ways to access our material, and giving it a local identity does that.”

Not incidentally, these adaptations give new--and very lucrative--life to old formula series. Licensing fees for situation comedies run around $10,000 per episode, according to Bricault; game shows around $7,000, and reality shows close to $5,000. When production costs are added on, a reformatted episode of “Who’s the Boss?” in Germany, for example, will run about $200,000, compared to $50,000 for the dubbed version.

To Helmut Thoma, managing director of RTL, Germany’s largest private television network, the quadrupling in price is worth it. “A dubbed series is perceived as foreign and has only a limited ratings potential,” Thoma points out. “But if you turn this same foreign series into a German version, the ratings potential is two or three times higher.”

Given the fact that two of the series RTL has reformatted so far--”Who’s the Boss?” and “Married . . . With Children”--have bombed, these are the words of a true believer. (Encouraged by the success of another foreign adaptation, “The Restless Years,” an Australian series developed by Grundy, Thoma is ready to embark next on a reformatted “Maude.”)

The RTL executive is the first to admit that the local versions suffered from fundamental problems. “There’s no tradition of sitcoms here,” Thoma explains. “Finding the writers in Germany is very difficult and the German actors simply didn’t understand the scripts. Even the sets looked more American than German. The audiences could not relate to the shows at all.”

With “Who’s the Boss?” Thoma found frankly that “the German actors were not as good as the Americans.” The hybrid set posed another stumbling block. John Barber, the show’s American producer, recalls his dismay at befuddled German audiences recoiling from it, protesting: “What is this? It’s an American house with German furniture.” The final shot in the foot was the network’s ill-advised slot for the reformatted weekly show--three hours after the daily dubbed version. Ignominiously, the German adaptation drew consistently poorer ratings, and the German press ridiculed it with headlines reading: “Beware forgery.”

The adaptation process was fraught with growing pains and cultural confusions, starting with the series’ initial premise. “I have to be a bit careful about stereotyping the German sense of humor, but the Germans can be extremely rigid,” Bingham delicately observes. “I remember one conversation where someone objected, ‘Ah, but in Germany, women do not have male housekeepers.’ And we answered, quite tongue in cheek, ‘Really, how surprising, in Britain and the United States, nearly all women have male housekeepers.’ We had a little difficulty explaining to them that’s part of the fun and fantasy of the thing.”

The next major hurdle was training German scriptwriters how to write for this new animal--the totally unfamiliar situation comedy--using German actors who had never before played in them. “Part of the process that makes American sitcoms so contemporary is giving feedback to the writers on how the show is actually coming to life,” explains Barber. “This proved very confusing to the writers and the cast, since in German TV, the finished script is considered untouchable. Still, they ended up adapting quite well, taking risks no one had ever asked them to take before.”

The series was produced in Berlin with a cast drawn from all over the country. Despite a fleeting resemblance to Tony Danza, his German counterpart lacked Danza’s energy and stage presence. “We had to find ways of protecting him more so he would not be overwhelmed and would be as attractive to women as Danza,” says Barber.

In the adaptation process, American institutions are Germanized: Thanksgiving dinner might become the pre-Lenten carnival celebration Fasching ; a suburban outdoor barbecue set instead in a beer garden.

Generally speaking, about 75% of the jokes go over with foreign audiences with simple translation. But as Bingham points out, “It’s easier to do sitcoms that are not full of one-liners, but where the emphasis is on the situation more than the jokes driving the comedy.”

Occasionally, what seem to be sure-fire routines in one country draw an absolute blank in others. “Sesame Street’s” Urist recalls one memorably frustrating meeting with producers of the Mexican version screening a skit entitled “What’s Alive.”

“Tully was hopping up and down, crying out: ‘Pick me, pick me!’ We were dying with laughter and the Mexicans were stone-faced. How do you teach a sense of humor?” he asks rhetorically.

For the British “Who’s the Boss?” Walker ultimately had to jettison all the scripts that were centered around American high schools. “The whole culture of cheerleaders, proms and football jocks doesn’t readily translate to an English environment,” he explains. By contrast, episodes where the ex-footballer is ridiculed at an exclusive boarding school and an equally exclusive golf club were another story. The producer found that “shows based on social snobbery worked better in Britain than in the original.”

“People say that Brits and Americans are divided by a common language, but a lot of the jokes did transfer. The main thing I toned down were the vulgar elements--that sort of slapstick, physical humor.”

If the American formula continues to draw audiences, why not simply--and more cheaply--make a close study of American series and write your own? By and large, this has not happened--for the practical reason that this imitative, unauthorized borrowing generally does not work as well. In cases where it does, it has struck fear and resentment in the executive suites and has undoubtedly nudged American distributors to speed up the pace of licensing reformat deals. NBC’s Todd Leavitt, executive vice president of NBC International, can barely contain his contempt for European--and particularly French--spinoffs.

“After the dubbed version of ‘Saved by the Bell’ proved such a great success in France, there was a whole crew of ‘derivative’ products like ‘Helene et les Garcons’ (‘Helen and the Boys’) that were French versions of our shows, without the time and attention to plot we take,” he complains from the network’s Burbank office. “They would shoot an episode in two days and eventually the show gobbled up 60% of the audience share.

“Where our shows use between eight to 15 writers doing 22-24 episodes a year, the French situation comedy will have two to four writers churning out 50 episodes and more a year. Where we spend north of $600,000 per episode, the French will spend the equivalent of $125,000.”

Voila : another convincing argument encouraging American distributors to turn to format licensing--heading foreign producers off at the pass while simultaneously stretching out the profitable life of long-running series.

“The big advantage to reformatting American shows,” says Peter Brouwer, president of Endemol Entertainment, B.V., “is that you know you have a proven success on your hands.” Endemol’s latest project is an upcoming adaptation of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” for the German network RTL Plus.

“This is a whole new way of working with American distributors,” Brouwer maintains. “It’s a shift in the industry that the European Commission very much favors. They want to take advantage of American television expertise and let European writers and producers master the story structures themselves. It’s a great boon to the European television industry.

“The key to success,” he adds, alluding to the failure of earlier reformatted series in Germany, “is not to let audiences know they are watching reformatted American shows.”

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“All in the Family” was based on the British series, “Till Death Us Do Part,” (the correct name) not on a series called “Till Death Do Us Part.”

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