When the Pub Landlord met Cheers

There's a long and noble tradition of Brit dramas and comedies being remade by US TV networks and... well, dying on their arse, mostly. The shared characteristic of these remakes seems to be that the US translators throw out virtually everything distinctive about the original, which begs the question - why bother?

Well now comedian Al Murray is to attempt the tricky transition, with his Pub Landlord character to form the basis of a Fox sitcom pilot.

Coupling was a high profile recent example of a UK remake that failed to click with American audiences - which sparked a tirade from Brit creator Steven Moffat. But the pantheon of heroic British failures Stateside also includes Cracker, One Foot in the Grave, The Kumars at No 42 and Men Behaving Badly, to name but a few.

NBC's remake of The Office has bucked the trend, after a shaky start, and the same network is about to launch its version of Channel 4's Teachers.

The ferociously competitive economics of the US TV market, with each network ordering dozens of pilots each year but commissioning only a handful, mean the odds are staked against Murray and his UK producer, Avalon, from the outset.

Murray's previous sitcom outing with his Pub Landlord character, in the Sky One show Time Gentlemen Please, also got a mixed critical reaction.

On the other hand the Pub Landlord may just play to American cliches of good old Blighty. His male chauvinism and xenophobia could go down well in the red states, while the blue states may warm to the fact that Murray is also lampooning such views - he's an Oxford history graduate and related to William Makepeace Thackeray, don'cha know.

Will Murray be a hit or a miss in the land of the free, d'ya think? And did you ever see a US remake that was better than the Brit TV original?