cisco said..This is classic Aussie black humour and I don't think it could be sold overseas. They just wouldn't get it.
Dead set funny as a hat full of aresholes.
Check it out here
iview.abc.net.au return of
Rake to our screens coincides, roughly, with the premiere of the US version of
Rake, which is now three weeks into its first season. Greg Kinnear plays the leading character (renamed Keegan Deane) and several of the Australian creatives serve as executive producers.
While the US
Rake hasn’t been quite the critical flop that the misguided US remake of
Kath and Kim was, it certainly hasn’t been met with the same kind of enthusiasm that the local series received, and ratings have been dropping fairly sharply since its premiere. The problem is that when
Rake made the leap to a commercial US network, it had its edges sanded off, which makes it feel like, as many US critics have already noted, any number of other legal procedurals. It’s essentially
Boston Legal, focused on just one character. The legal and political plot points of the Australian
Rake have always been intriguing (who could forget Hugo Weaving’s cannibalistic character in the pilot, or Toni Collette as NSW Premier?), but it was always Greene’s world and his relationships (particularly his relationships with women) that were the source of the best drama. In the US version, those relationships are developing a little too slowly (although Aussies Miranda Otto as Greene’s ex-wife and Bojana Novakovic as prostitute and love interest Melissa are both turning in fine performances) and there’s, arguably, too greater focus on the cases. On the basis of the first three episodes, it’s hard to imagine that the US version could ever go into the territory that the original did in last night’s episode. It’s just too light, too risk-averse and too homogenously “neat”. It’s not as if last night’s episode on ABC1 was revolutionary, by any stretch of the imagination, but that the creators behind the original
Rake are willing to take any risk at all in the current TV environment is worthy of praise. In a recent interview with
The Hollywood Reporter, Rake creator Peter Duncan said that the major difference between making TV in Australia and in the US was that there are many more voices in the US. Do too many cooks spoil the broth? Well there’s a safeness so far that suggests this might be the case. If Fox is willing to take risks with their version of
Rake, they might be able to develop an audience. If not, it will slowly morph into something audiences have seen time and again. And you can catch
Boston Legal re-runs for that.
