Super Size Me is the major problem of American adaptations of content originating elsewhere.  The wonderful Austrailian series, The Slap is a good example.

In the original series, a conglomeration of friends and relatives are bonded as family.  They come together for Hector’s 40th birthday.

A young overindulged child, Hugo, is insufferable during the day, ruining other’s toys and finally swinging a cricket bat at another child’s head.

Harry (not the child’s father) picks Hugo up and when Hugo kicks him, Harry slaps the boy. Rosie, Hugo’s mom, goes ballistic. The aftermath of the slap tears the family apart.

In the original, Hector is a low-level city administrator, stalled in his job. He’s feeling his age and fantasizes about their young babysitter.  In the American version, he upgraded to architect and city planner, but still idealizes the babysitter.

His wife, Aisha, is a veterinarian with a small practice.  In the American version, she is promoted to a medical doctor and head of a successful clinic.

Rosie, Hugo’s mom, is a stay at home hippy mom and lives in a ramshackle home with husband, Garry, a failed artist/painter working as a laborer. In the American version, she lives in an artistically expensive bohemian home with husband, Garry a successful well-known artist/painter.

Hector, in the Australian version, is a mechanic and car salesman. He is the slapper. In the American version, he is a rare auto dealer.

It is as if American writers and showrunners believe conflict is intensified and the dramatic stakes are raised if the characters are high-status individuals. The American version flopped while the Australian version garnered a variety of awards, deservedly so.

All you need to know about the Super Size Me phenomena is the American remake of  Los Misterios de Laura, The Mysteries of Laura.  In the South American series, the heroine is a frumpy middle-aged Columbo-like female detective called Laura Pero (Laura the Hound). In the American series she is played by a glamorous, Debra Messing named Laura Diamond. In one episode, the slender curvaceous Messing swims in a $1300 bathing suit at a spa she is surveilling.

My advice to American Broadcasters is “get real” and stop Super Sizing. It doesn’t improve the story and in most cases ruins it!

The future is arriving faster that anyone expected.  It is playing out in the biggest pay-TV provider, Comcast’s  takeover of NBC and Rupert Murdock’s battle with Time Warner cable.   Here’s an interesting article from the Hollywood Reporter on how the TV business model is unravelling in front of our very eyes.

For more than 60 years, TV stations have broadcast news, sports and entertainment for free and made their money by showing commercials. That might not work much longer.

The business model is unraveling at ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox and the local stations that carry the networks’ programming. Cable TV and the Web have fractured the audience for free TV and siphoned its ad dollars. The recession has squeezed advertising further, forcing broadcasters to accelerate their push for new revenue to pay for programming.

That will play out in living rooms across the country. The changes could mean higher cable or satellite TV bills, as the networks and local stations squeeze more fees from pay-TV providers such as Comcast and DirecTV for the right to show broadcast TV channels in their lineups. The networks might even ditch free broadcast signals in the next few years. Instead, they could operate as cable channels — a move that could spell the end of free TV as Americans have known it since the 1940s.

Full article here