Gracepoint
In 2011, MTV premiered its own supposedly Americanized version of the British cult teen television show Skins. What aired was a blasphemous doppelganger that blatantly copied every aspect of the show it credited as inspiration. The show lasted just two months before cancellation.
Now, Fox follows in MTV’s slippery steps with this season’s Gracepoint: an outright ripoff of BBC’s Broadchurch miniseries.
The premise for both the British and American versions is identical and simple enough: A detective team attempts to solve the murder of a young boy in a small town where everyone is a suspect.
Sure, it’s fine to make tweaks for the sake of cultural relevancy. After all, the original British version of The Office wouldn’t have been nearly as successful in the states as its American adaptation was.
Gracepoint, though, is shamefully uncreative, to such a degree that it feels wrong to call it an adaptation at all. It’s a shot-by-shot copycat of its UK counterpart, from specific camera angles to musical motifs to the dialogue (save for the accents). You could play the two pilots side-by-side and be hard-pressed to find a meaningful difference between them.
What’s more, the few changes Gracepoint chooses to make are decidedly for the worse.
Why, for instance, is it OK for David Tennant to jump across the pond and fake an accent while his co-star Olivia Colman is replaced by a post-Breaking Bad Anna Gunn, despite Colman having won Leading Actress at the British Academy Television Awards for the role? It’s as if BBC were to produce its own reimagining of True Detective, in which Matthew McConaughey feigned a British accent but Woody Harrelson was all but absent. While, of course, it’s impossible to imagine McConaughey without his signature Southern drawl, perhaps even more unbelievable is the possibility of abandoning Harrelson in such a venture.
The looming finale is another point of contention. Right now, Gracepoint is almost halfway into its 10-episode series arc, so it’s too early to discern how the climax will hold up in comparison to that of Broadchurch. The network vows it will differ from its predecessor, but it’s hard to avoid the fact that Broadchurch’s shocking twist ending is partially, if not primarily, what made the series so excellent the first time around.
The show itself isn’t bad so much as redundant. While Gracepoint might be entertaining for a viewer without prior knowledge of Broadchurch, it’s also somewhat ignorant. Watching it is akin to seeing the Harry Potter movies without reading the books they are based on (though, admittedly, the Harry Potter films are far from a faithful adaptation).
If you’re already watching Gracepoint, I maintain: Stop watching. Instead, tune in to Broadchurch, the first and better of the two.
