The Inbetweeners USA

Details

Will's parents have just divorced and, as a result, he's been forced to leave his fee-paying private school, move to a new area with his mother and enrol at the local high school. It's a whole new world for Will, complete with doorless toilet cubicles, dodgy canteen food, budget cuts and the usual collection of bullies waiting to make his arrival as unpleasant as possible.

Having previously attended private school, some of Will's more snobbish tendencies have survived the move and it doesn't take long before he's managed to irritate just about everybody around him. Things aren't helped by the school's policy of forcing each new arrival to wear an enormous green badge bearing their name, effectively turning Will into a walking target for anybody looking for somebody new to torment.

Nevertheless, with no friends and little choice in the matter, Will decides that this is the perfect opportunity to start afresh and reinvent himself. Unfortunately, becoming popular is going to require rather more effort than he'd anticipated. Enter the initially reluctant Simon, Neil and Jay, three boys who aren't cool enough to be popular but aren't geeky enough to be nerds either. They exist somewhere awkwardly in the middle - they're the Inbetweeners.

Simon remains hopelessly obsessed with childhood friend Carly D'Amato, whilst Jay is the group's resident sex-obsessed fantasist whose stories become increasingly unbelievable the longer he talks. Neil, meanwhile, inhabits a slightly different universe from everybody else and frequently appears blissfully unaware of just how stupid some of the things he says actually sound.

The four soon become friends and begin stumbling their way through the awkward and frequently humiliating experience of being teenagers. Girls, parties, alcohol, school and their almost complete lack of social skills provide an endless supply of potential disasters. Together they find strength in their shortcomings - mostly by mercilessly mocking one another. But then again, that's what friends are there for.

Picture & Sound

The picture is bright and colourful in the way that only an annoyingly hot and sunny American location seems capable of producing. Sure, there are some of the usual colour issues associated with an NTSC conversion, but colours remain rich enough and there's plenty of detail in both the daytime and night-time scenes. Skin tones are warm and there are no significant problems with artifacting or outlining.

It's never going to be anything particularly spectacular, but then again it's simply an American television series - albeit one apparently made with a budget that surpassed that of The Inbetweeners Movie! Overall, the transfer is clean, colourful and perfectly adequate for the material.

The Dolby Digital 2.0 192Kbps soundtrack is more than sufficient for its needs, with both the monologues and dialogue remaining easily audible throughout. However, the musical soundtrack can become a little overbearing at times, with plenty of music I've never heard of - or particularly liked - and unless you're into your American music I doubt you will either.

Still, given that the series was produced for MTV, it's hardly surprising that music figures heavily in a programme based around, and aimed primarily at, teenagers. It's functional rather than impressive, but does everything that's required of it.

Menu & Extras

The menus across both discs are nicely animated and scored in a manner not too dissimilar to the original UK releases. There's the usual option of playing the complete set of episodes on each disc as well as selecting individual episodes, with each episode also accompanied by the usual scene-selection options. It's all pretty standard stuff really, but pleasantly presented.

Although the original press release stated that the release would include Behind the Scenes Footage and Deleted Scenes, they're nowhere to be found on the two discs supplied for review. I even checked the BBFC website to see whether anything was listed there, but alas it looks as though they're either non-existent or have been reserved for the American market.

I'm always a fan of extras. They can add some much-needed value to a disc, especially if you've already seen the main feature and need something extra to tempt you into a purchase. Still, as I haven't seen The Inbetweeners USA before, nor noticed it advertised for transmission on E4 or Channel 4, I suppose we're getting an entire unseen series as the extra!

Overall

Our friends across the pond don't exactly have a great track record when it comes to remaking popular British television shows - especially, for some odd reason, those home-grown comedies that help make Channel 4 stand out from the crowd. With the American remake of Skins axed after a single season and attempts at The IT Crowd and Peep Show failing to make it beyond the pilot stage, expectations weren't exactly high. Curiosity alone was probably going to be enough to drag fans of the original series, including myself, into the fold.

However, it's not all doom and gloom. Shameless appears to have transferred successfully whilst the BBC's The Office has become enormously successful in its American incarnation. Perhaps the important difference is that the successful remakes haven't simply attempted to recreate their British counterparts word for word. They took the original idea and developed something that worked for an American audience. A smattering of originality certainly doesn't go amiss.

So when I originally heard that one of my all-time favourite comedy series was getting an American makeover, I could easily have been mistaken for a lifelike recreation of Edvard Munch's famous painting The Scream. Surely they couldn't do justice to a programme built around a particularly British mixture of embarrassment, sarcasm, insults and four teenage boys being absolutely horrible to one another?

Unfortunately, the early episodes didn't do much to change my mind. Several scenes and chunks of dialogue are copied almost word for word from the British series and, rather than reminding me how funny the originals were, they merely demonstrate that copying the words isn't enough. Jokes that had me in fits of laughter the first time around barely raised a smile here and I found myself shifting rather uneasily in my seat. At times I actually felt a little embarrassed for everyone involved.

Part of the problem is that the original characters are so firmly associated with the actors who created them. Joey Pollari's Will and Bubba Lewis's Simon simply didn't feel right to me and, particularly during those early episodes, I found both characters rather annoying. Whether that's entirely their fault is questionable; trying to recreate characters as distinctive as Will McKenzie and Simon Cooper was always going to be a thankless task.

Surprisingly, I warmed considerably more to the American versions of Neil and Jay. Mark L. Young's air-headed Neil is probably the biggest success and eventually provides many of the show's better laughs. Zack Pearlman's Jay also works reasonably well once you stop comparing every line and mannerism with James Buckley's original version.

The biggest disappointment is Mr Gilbert. Greg Davies turned the original character into a genuinely intimidating psychopath who seemed to derive enormous pleasure from making Will's life miserable. Brett Gelman's version feels much more like a conventional school bully and loses much of the menace that made the British Gilbert so hilariously unpredictable. He isn't terrible; he's simply nowhere near as funny.

However, something rather unexpected happens as the series progresses: it starts getting better. Once the programme stops slavishly copying its British counterpart and begins developing its own stories, characters and distinctly American personality, I gradually found myself warming to it. The comparisons with the original become less distracting and the programme starts behaving more like an American teenage comedy in its own right.

There's still plenty I don't particularly like. The music continues to irritate me and at times the whole thing feels rather like a poor man's American Pie. The humour has also inevitably been adjusted for an American television audience, losing some of the swearing and rougher edges of the original. Yet once I accepted that this wasn't really going to be the Inbetweeners I knew and loved, I started to sit up and take notice.

I even laughed.

And that's why discovering that the series won't be returning for a second season is surprisingly disappointing. After the decidedly shaky opening episodes, there are genuine signs towards the end that the writers and cast are beginning to discover what their version of The Inbetweeners could actually be. Had they been given another series and continued moving away from simply recreating the British programme, there's a possibility it might have developed into something worthwhile.

For British viewers, though, it's always going to face an almost impossible problem: the original exists. Every character, joke and familiar situation invites comparison and, however much I tried to approach the remake on its own terms, it was virtually impossible not to think back to Simon Bird, Joe Thomas, James Buckley and Blake Harrison delivering the same material considerably more successfully.

As a remake of one of my favourite British comedies, The Inbetweeners USA doesn't really work. As an American teenage comedy that gradually begins finding its own identity, however, it's nowhere near as disastrous as I feared. There are flashes of promise, particularly in the later episodes, but unfortunately they arrive too late to save the series from cancellation.

Still, on the plus side, watching it has really made me want to break out my original Inbetweeners DVDs again. I suppose that's one recommendation I can safely make.

Special features

• None