There’s good news for UK fans of the hardest-working local government department in Indiana, as the fourth season of Parks and Recreation is finally set to surface on Dave.
The series took an age to reach British shores, with BBC4 picking up the first seasons at the same time as the penultimate season was airing in the US. But despite a top-drawer cast, with Amy Poehler, Nick Offerman, Aziz Ansari and Jurassic World star Chris Pratt playing some of the most enjoyable characters in modern sitcom history in a pitch-perfect caricature of small midwestern city life, the show hasn’t really managed to grab the British audience it deserves.
But it’s not the first time an acclaimed US show has been mishandled when it’s found a British home.
Seinfeld
Unquestionably one of the US’s biggest sitcom hits, BBC2 schedulers initially seemed confident that the British public would embrace Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer like fellow American imports, burgers and Budweiser, and gave the series a prime midweek 9pm slot. But when that initial enthusiasm was curbed, Seinfeld was sent bouncing around the TV listings. In the days before digital EPGs, any show would find it hard to build an audience if no one could work out what time, or even day, it was on, meaning that Seinfeld fandom soon became the sole preserve of the especially determined comedy fan.
Breaking Bad
Possibly a watermark in British broadcasting history, Breaking Bad was a must-see TV series that wasn’t – for the most part – actually on television. Despite low-key airings on FX and Channel Five, it was on file-sharing sites where popularity swelled for the adventures of unconventional science teacher Walter White. With an audience preferring to leap online to BitTorrent or watch it on DVD, it was left to Netflix to finally bring the final seasons of Breaking Bad to British screens. It has taken until 2015 for new digital channel Spike to finally show Breaking Bad’s final seasons on TV in the UK.
Family Guy
Family Guy is now hot enough to generate an unseemly scrap between BBC2 and ITV, but it took time for the Griffins to capture the attention of an audience over here. With both Sky One and Channel 4 hoping the series would be a surrogate Simpsons, censors set about recklessly snipping away racier material to fit the series into a teatime slot. The BBC eventually bagged the rights, along with Seth McFarlane’s other show American Dad. The series was shoved into an unforgiving Saturday night timeslot, at an hour where most of the intended audience would be watching Match of the Day or out drinking enough alcohol to floor Mickey McFinnigan. The show was shunted to late-night BBC3, where the series gradually began to find an appreciative audience, although the new series will be shown on ITV in the autumn with the rest of McFarlane’s cartoon world.
Late Night with David Letterman
David Letterman provided the de facto template for most British chatshows of the 1990s – Danny Baker After All, The Jack Docherty Show, TFI Friday – so it seemed to make sense that the nation would fall for the original if they were given an opportunity to watch the toothy talk supremo himself. But despite Sky1, Paramount, ITV2, ITV4 and (yes!) DivaTV all showing Late Night at various points over the years, Letterman never found a solid fanbase in the UK. In hindsight, perhaps British viewers weren’t the target audience for Top Ten List zingers about David Dinkins or Jim Bakker.
Bob’s Burgers
Following the success of The Simpsons, just about every UK network has clamoured for a similarly sized animated hit over the years, with varying degrees of success. Arguably the closest US TV has come to recapturing that initial Springfield magic is Loren Bouchard’s tale of a family running an unsuccessful east coast burger restaurant. It’s done well in the US, surviving in Fox’s Sunday animation strand where American Dad and The Cleveland Show have since perished, and making it to a sixth season. The first couple of seasons managed an almost apologetic airing on E4, before being dumped to make way for yet more repeats of The Big Bang Theory.
Season four of Parks and Recreation starts tonight, 8pm, Dave
