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The review notes that the pilot script is almost a carbon copy of the British pilot, but with an added third act. This was my problem with the US pilot of The Office. Not the changes, but the incompetent reproduction. I've heard that as they move away from direct lifting the show got better, and I've seen enough random episodes of Season 2 and 3 here and there to agree, but those early episodes of The Office were terribly painful. Steve Carrell is not Ricky Gervais. He's funny in his own way. To have him try and do Gervais would be dumb. Likewise, there is only one Simon Pegg. Whoever they get to "play" him would not be up to par, and having that poor sod try and do an imitation of Pegg would be too embarrassing to watch.

Adam Barr, the writer, made a point to distinguish this as a separate reinterpretation of the original, but seeing how it sticks really close to the British version, the separation amounts to nothing but name changes. Tim and Daisy have been renamed Ben and Apryl. Yes, Apryl.

When Ben and Apryl meet landlady Marsha (the only character who has the same name as the British-counterpart) for the first time, Marsha says, "Hello. I'm Marsha. You must be Tim and Daisy." Ben replies, "No. Ben and Apryl". Interpret that tiny exchange how you will.

I think I'll interpret it as a fail-safe mechanism. They're afraid of fans accusing them of portraying beloved characters incorrectly. So they're creating "new" characters that they can mold at will and use to argue that they're not stampeding on the original Spaced's territory. But that's a weak defense, isn't it? Especially if they're barely changing the actual episode.

Something that was somewhat unique in Spaced was how they took their time with certain character aspects, unlike the sitcom staple of introducing and resolving everything in one episode. Nick Frost's character Mike doesn't even appear in the pilot, and Tim doesn't confront the best friend who stole his girlfriend until the fourth episode (where it's not even resolved, they just play paintball and shoot at each other). In the US remake, it's tacked on to the third act of the pilot, where "Ben" actually confronts his girlfriend and the new man about their relationship.

You see, at page 23, Barr runs out of Original Pilot. So what does he do? He creates a new conflict where Ben and Apryl are having doubts about moving in with each other. Ben's thought-process seems understandable and is familiar to anyone who's about to share their home with someone they don't too well. Apryl, on the other hand, become a neurotic drama-queen who thinks that Ben has gone to murder his ex-girlfriend. It's clearly her imagination getting away from her, but that's good enough to phone up her friend, look up Ben's MySpace page (which does involve a good joke using photos of Ben and an unhappy Samuel L. Jackson), and then the show goes into coincidence-overload as pretty much every character except Marsha meets in a creme-puff store.

After an over-done emotional battle between Ben, Yumi, and Clinton where the new couple shout dime-store psychoanalysis at Ben for a good few pages, Barr does his damndest to resolve the situation and give Ben back his dignity with a fun action scene where Ben, Apryl, and Bill go into "videogame-mode" and creme-puffs are the ammo. It's a clever sequence ruined by reusing the Flavor Flav joke.

At this point, it's useless to pick apart jokes. They're just jokes. Yeah, that Flavor Flav reference sounds uber-lame, but you can't fault this project entirely on that. It's just a joke; falling flat or not will depend on the viewer's position on Flavor Flav. My problem with this remake from the very beginning has been the idea of a remake itself. No matter how good it could be, no matter how funny they make it, it will still be a sad attempt. Matt Goldberg pretty much nailed it on the head with his closing paragraph:

The sad thing is (or at least, one of many sad things regarding this project) that this script is probably as good as it could get short of having the input of Pegg/Stevenson/Wright and the courage to take the premise and similar characters and move it in an entirely new direction. But this imitation of greatness is just that: an imitation. You can crib all the lines you want from the original but the truth is this: There's only one Simon Pegg. There's only one Jessica Stevenson. There's only one Edgar Wright. And without even so much as their blessing in attempting a remake, there's really only one "Spaced". Barr's script is the key piece of evidence proving that these three people were not just the creators of the show but an essential part of why it worked.

Ding-ding.

But one more point: it's pretty disheartening that they can not only essentially snatch a script and reshoot it, but more so because they're doing it without the consent of the original writers (unlike The Office remake, which Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant are producers of). This is Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson's written words. These people are going to say those words and play their jokes without the writers' blessing. This is heinous. I'd probably be less heart-wrenched if they simply steal the premise and run with it. To f-ck it up faithfully? That hurts.

And seriously, why would you even need to? The original series was in English (excluding the need of subtitles), contains mostly American pop culture jokes, and Simon Pegg is a pretty big movie star in the US now. Why not bank on that and show the show as it is (which BBC America already did)?

The answer? There are only 14 episodes of the original Spaced. That's two seasons in the UK, but only one in the States. They can't count on syndication and watch the cash roll in, and they can't hope for it to bring in ratings for years and years.

Unacceptable, obviously.

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