Can Torchwood Travel?

Posted on Wednesday January 20, 2010, 08:52 by James White in Small Screen

America, eh? They just can't stop stealing our telly ideas. Those colonials! Why can't they come up with some programmes of their own? Except, of course for The West Wing. And Battlestar Galactica. And Star Trek. And Mad Men. And… All right, so they've got a few.

But for some reason, there's an endless fascination with buying up UK properties, slapping on a few new names and tweaks like a house-flipper after a profit and shoving them out to a largely unsuspecting American TV audience. The misses, thus far, have outweighed the hits.

My focus, however, is not on the scorecard for US translations of UK shows. It's on one particular series: Torchwood. Yes, the Doctor Who spin-off. Which launched with the promise of being an X-Files for Cardiff, a locally-based, but universally-plotted peek into the world of a crack team battling alien problems conveniently centered in Wales.

Of course, what we actually got in that first season was a seriously off-kilter mishmash of occasional fun moments stymied by OTT camp, several characters you wanted to see killed before the credits finished rolling and very little that made it all work. Season Two showed some improvement, but we had to wait until last year's suitably epic miniseries Children Of Earth for Torchwood to mature into something close to its promise.

Cue renewed interest, not just from Auntie Beeb here at home. Nope, BBC Worldwide, the distribution/marketing arm, which is slowly spreading its tentacles across the States thanks to the likes of BBC America, has also been quietly making its plans.

And now, they've gone and sold the Torchwood format to Fox. Yes, Fox. You know, the ones who rarely let sci-fi TV shows breathe (Firefly, Dollhouse, The Sarah Connor Chronicles) before reaching for the cloth sack, stones and map to the nearest area of deep water. Fox, who, with McG, were trying to remake Spaced.

But take heart, faithful viewer, as the man himself might say: Doctor Who rejuvenator and Torchwood creator Russell T Davies has his hand in, along with executive producers Julie Gardner and Jane Tranter, who are all living out in LA right now, working on projects with BBC Worldwide. Davies will write the pilot script for the new version of Torchwood and, if we're all really good and eat all our sprouts, we might just see John Barrowman as Captain Jack Harkness. You may now cheer/vomit, depending on your feelings towards the man who can't die and who shags anything that moves.

Can Torchwood translate? The current word is that the US version will have a more global outlook than just one area and given the extraterrestrial slant, it could certainly benefit from the boosted budget of US network telly. And if it can gather an audience, X-Files-style, it might just live a little longer than any of the recent attempts.

I just hope the bigger scope and heftier VFX budget doesn't mean we get Davies' spectacle-loving instincts run rampant, with the universe imploding every time the season finale shows up.

It could work. It could be brilliant. But it could also be awful. And even if it's a success, it could lead to someone in the Bright Ideas Department thinking that maybe good ol' Doctor Who could also handle a US-based regeneration. To which I say, remember the 1996 TV movie. Then find a tape of it, and shove it where the Cloister Bell doesn't ring.

Torchwood US, though… Discuss.