American television has a long history of quietly adapting British shows, often smoothing the edges of their grittier UK counterparts. Before Steve Carell became the face of the U.S. version of The Office, Ricky Gervais had already perfected his painfully awkward David Brent in the British original. Long before Emmy Rossum took on the role of Fiona Gallagher in Showtime’s Shameless, Anne-Marie Duff was portraying a rougher, rawer Fiona across the Atlantic. Whenever a buzzy new American series drops, it’s worth checking if there’s a scrappier British version that came first—there often is.
This pattern goes back decades. In the 1970s, two major American sitcoms—Sanford and Son and All in the Family—were both rooted in British TV. Sanford and Son drew inspiration from Steptoe and Son, which aired from 1962 to 1974. The core father-son setup remained the same in both: an older, stubborn, bigoted father and his more progressive son. But the UK version leaned into a darker, more downtrodden tone. The elder Steptoe came across as weaker and more pitiable, while the American Fred Sanford had more swagger and the mischievous charm of a seasoned hustler.
All in the Family owed its origins to the 1965 British series Till Death Us Do Part. Both shows centered on a working-class man with deeply entrenched prejudices butting heads with younger, more liberal characters. Yet the differences were stark: Alf and Elsie, the couple in the British version, traded harsher insults and embodied a grimmer domestic dynamic than Archie and Edith Bunker. The Bunkers’ home was tidier and more spacious, and Archie’s bigotry was generally toned down for U.S. audiences.
In short, American remakes usually soften their British predecessors—swapping grit for warmth and sentimentality, and sanding down the sharper edges of the original characters.
