McG To Produce U.S. Remake of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s Spaced
Before Hot Fuzz and before Shaun of the Dead, Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg had a comedy series called Spaced on Channel 4 in the U.K. It ran for two seasons and starred Pegg as an aspiring comic book artist and massive fan of science-fiction and video games, who poses as a couple with a complete stranger so that they can rent a flat together. Now it looks like Spaced is about to make its way stateside courtesy of Fox.
Producer McG and writer Adam Barr will develop a pilot, which has supposedly attracted the interest of several networks already. I can see why: not only are remakes of British sitcoms hot on TV right now (The Office, The I.T. Crowd) but so are geeks (Chuck, The Big Bang Theory, Reaper). While the involvement of McG (The O.C.) has me a little worried, Adam Barr was a writer on the cult classic 90’s series Parker Lewis Can’t Lose once upon a time. Hey I’ll give this a shot. Now if I could just get my hands on a region-free DVD player to watch the first season of Spaced that’s currently sitting on my shelf!
Comments (6)
Ha, Parker Lewis was pretty funny. I haven’t seen the original series I wonder if it has a PL feel to it?
Posted by Ian on October 30th, 2007You could always hook up your computer to go region-free.
Posted by Steven on October 30th, 2007Why? Why do this? The British version is hilarious already. Just get the rights to show it over here on this side of the pond and release a damn DVD copy that we can watch. Is the American remake going to have Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright in it? If not, who in the world could they get to replace them? My opinion is: nobody. Those jokes and that style of humor are perfectly suited for Pegg, which is why the original series was so good. I would rather continue watching the copies of the show I downloaded online than see a remake. Blah.
And no, I don’t like the American version of The Office, but for that matter, I wasn’t a huge fan of the British one either.
Posted by Rian on October 30th, 2007I agree with Rian, leave the British version alone! The show is hilarious and I was kinda bummed, when I first got into it, that it only had two seasons. Now, do I wanna see more “Spaced”? Yeah! Do I wanna see some american actors try to import british comedy!? Hell no! Just release the dvd or get the rights to broadcast it over here…after all, Simon Pegg has somewhat of a notoriety this side of the Atlantics, I’m sure that his fan base would watch on top of the potential target audience.
Posted by Julien on October 30th, 2007They probably see the success of “The Office” and think they can exploit this and make some money. But they haven’t even talked to Wright or Pegg about it while the creators of “The Office” took the time to assure Gervais and Merchant. It’s good because it will bring more attention to the genius original but I hope this show fails.
Posted by Jason on October 31st, 2007Leave a Reply