The shooting script for the canned US Spaced remake has appeared online. Would it really have been as bad as fans of the original feared?
Remember when someone in the US thought it would be a good idea to remake the classic late-90s sitcom, Spaced? It's now two years since an abortive pilot episode was filmed and then quietly canned after a hugely negative reaction from fans of the UK original.
Last year, series director Edgar Wright made a quite reasoned argument as to why Spaced simply wouldn't work outside its north London setting.
"Part of the charm of Spaced is it's people in north London acting out stuff from American films... you know, Hollywood in, kind of, suburbia," Wright said in a Spaced reunion back in 2007. "American TV is much more glamorous. It doesn't make any sense. I remember that the producer at the time said, 'Yeah, we'd have to change a few things. We'd have to take out the drugs and the swearing, and obviously, Mike can't have guns."
Understandably angered that neither he nor fellow writer and performer Jessica Hynes had been consulted over the remake, Simon Pegg wrote a measured but vociferous statement about the matter in March 2008.
Two years after the proposed Spaced remake was nipped in the bud, a four-minute clip of the pilot appeared on the Internet, proving that such a production really was as bad as everyone feared it would be.
Most recently, the pilot's shooting script, written by Adam Barr, has appeared online, providing a better impression of how the entire episode would have played out for the first time.
The premise, of course, is the same - two 20-something house hunters pretend to be a married professional couple in order to secure a place to rent - and there are the requisite geek culture references familiar from the original Spaced, but the sparkle is clearly missing. That's, er, something of an understatement...
You can read the complete script at My PDF Scripts here.
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