Like all “unexplained outbreak” shows, E4’s latest US import Containment, which kicked off last week, saw people keeling over before the first ad break. The cause? A plague that triggers coughs, sneezes and inevitable death, leading police and health officials to quarantine the city of Atlanta. Is it an act of bioterrorism? Or did patient zero – a Syrian refugee, because why not add a hint of xenophobia – just have the world’s worst case of man flu?
Naturally, there are subplots running concurrent to the epidemic. Virus-fighting cop Lex, played by British actor David Gyasi (the best thing about this show) is having relationship problems with his girlfriend, Jana, while schoolteacher Katie ends up trapped inside a hospital with her young charges. She’s pretty calm about the whole impending doom thing, though her patience may wane when she realises she’ll be playing I-spy with six-year-olds until the end of time. Maybe she’s just glad to have the day off from marking. And then there’s Teresa, a pregnant teenager who was preparing to run away with her boyfriend when the city went into lockdown. Now they’re separated and frantically FaceTiming each other to figure out a new plan. Thank god for perfect 4G in the exclusion zone!
It may come as a surprise to learn that Containment – newly cancelled in the US – is based on a Belgian series, Cordon. Yes, that show is basically foreign drama’s equivalent of Hollyoaks when compared to, say, The Killing (which of course also got its own middling US remake), but it was by no means bad. The Antwerp-set thriller had a more austere feel and a darker colour palette. Ironically for a programme about phlegm-soaked disease, Containment sanitises its source material and makes everyone decidedly all-American. While Teresa’s mum seems only vaguely annoyed that her daughter is pregnant, poor Ineke in the original is given the sternest of treatment by her mother. Similarly, the terrorism plot feels less gratuitous in the original – although the might be just because of the Trump-style implications of watching a bunch of Americans gang up on an Arab family.
Perhaps this lacking “cultural transposition” is to be expected. When MTV remade Skins in 2011, they culled 80% of the swearing, drugs and, well, the essence of a programme about hard-living teens. The result was tamer than the inhabitants of London zoo, and so poorly received that it was pulled after a single season (the UK version ran to seven). And what of The Prisoner, the 2009 reimagining of the unsettling 60s series about a secret agent who finds himself trapped in a peculiar village? While that series laid the groundwork for so many spy narratives that followed, the remake by US network AMC was a shiny, flashback-heavy thing that posed one mystery above all: why do it?
Similarly, the New York version of Life on Mars reduced a high-concept idea down so much that the ending was Yankee Sam Tyler realising he was an astronaut from the year 2035 (yes, really). It makes Dallas’s “it was all a dream” shtick look subtle. And how about Gracepoint, the US take on Broadchurch? It might have had a chance as an average Middle-America thriller if it wasn’t for the presence of David Tennant, playing the exact same character but, erm, American. Couldn’t they have just given David Duchovny a call?
As Cordon, The Killing and so many others have proved, the US has a questionable record in reworking Euro drama. And yet, what they lack in originality and subtlety, they tend to make up for in endless big-budget action and slick aesthetics. Containment isn’t going to win any prizes, but if you’re looking for a big, trope-heavy series to take your mind off the increasing sense of apocalypse in the real world, you might find its silliness contagious.
