Lila Soto: Iris, long week — I have been thinking about demolition.
Lila Soto: Comedic demolition, specifically. The idea that when a joke crosses a border, the industry's actual answer isn't — translate it. It's tear the whole thing down and build something local from scratch. Which is today. How sitcom humor travels, and why it mostly can't without that.
Iris Holm: The format adaptation question.
Lila Soto: Right — and the number that keeps stopping me is twenty. Yo Soy Betty, la Fea, the Colombian telenovela from 1999, has been remade roughly twenty times globally. The US version, Ugly Betty. Croatia. The Netherlands. Twenty different production teams looked at that format and decided a dub wasn't enough — they needed their own version.
Iris Holm: Twenty is — okay, that's not adaptation. That's something more systematic than adaptation.
Lila Soto: It kind of is, yeah. And The Office is the cleaner case study for why. BBC, 2001 to 2003, Slough, David Brent — that show moves to NBC as The Office US, Scranton, Michael Scott. Same mockumentary shell, but the humor architecture inside it? Almost entirely rebuilt.
Iris Holm: So what broke in direct translation? Why couldn't they just subtitle Brent and ship it?
Lila Soto: Okay, think about a pun. A really good pun where two English words happen to sound identical — you know, like 'flour' and 'flower.' That joke exists because of a coincidence in how English sounds. You translate it into Spanish and — there's no joke anymore. Just a sentence about bread. The mechanism is gone.
Iris Holm: That's not a translation problem. That's structural.
Lila Soto: Exactly — it's an architecture problem. And the thing is, sitcom humor isn't just one layer like that pun. It's running several simultaneously. The Big Bang Theory, for example — that show is doing linguistic wordplay, topical science references, and social awkwardness cues all at once. When you subtitle it, you can carry the words. You cannot carry the sound coincidences, and you cannot carry the institutional feel.
Iris Holm: What do you mean institutional feel?
Lila Soto: Like — an HR joke. Someone sits in a mandatory sensitivity training and makes a face at the camera. American audiences have all sat in that room. They feel the absurdity before the punchline lands. Abroad? They recognize the office, the chairs, the fluorescent lighting — but the joke that's supposed to activate? Doesn't. Because the institution doesn't carry the same weight. You know it exists; you haven't lived the particular humiliation of it.
Iris Holm: So it's — wait. Is it ever just a language problem in isolation, or is it always the whole stack collapsing?
Lila Soto: Always the stack. I mean — the pun looks like a language problem until you realize even fixing the language doesn't save you if the cultural assumption underneath is missing. David Brent's humor in the UK Office works because British audiences know exactly what class his accent signals, what that office park in Slough means socially. You swap the accent for Scranton and suddenly you've changed who Michael Scott is, not just where he lives.
Iris Holm: And timing — comedic timing — that's baked into the sentence structure itself, right? The pause is written in.
Lila Soto: It is. Rewrite the dialogue for a different language's syntax and the pause lands in the wrong place. The joke falls before it was supposed to fall. Which is — I guess that's why the Australian Office isn't dubbing the US version. They're rebuilding, putting in Steve Irwin references, backyard cricket. Because vague localization gives you neither the original's specificity nor anything that actually feels local.
Iris Holm: And that's the producer's Tuesday. A woman in São Paulo, three weeks ago, sitting in a meeting with two options on the table — license the dubbed American version, or commission a full remake at three times the cost, eighteen months out. She chose the remake.
Lila Soto: Because the dubbed version — nobody there feels like it's theirs. That's the whole thing. 'Faster' doesn't beat 'ours.'
Iris Holm: But here's where I push back on the Office case specifically. The US version succeeded — commercially, obviously. And yet critics describe it as 'sillier, goofier, happier' than the UK original. 'Another animal.' That's not neutral language.
Lila Soto: No, it's not. David Brent is cringe-realist — that discomfort is the joke. Michael Scott gets rebuilt as a lovable idiot, and over time he gets — I mean, softer. The audience kind of captured the show? Or the show captured what the audience would tolerate. I'm not sure which direction that runs.
Iris Holm: That's audience capture, not adaptation.
Lila Soto: Yeah — and the mockumentary format survived the crossing completely intact. Same handheld camera, same talking-head confessionals, no laugh track. The container traveled. The humor architecture inside it got rebuilt almost from scratch. Which means format and humor are actually separable things, and the industry figured that out.
Iris Holm: So format remakes are the correct industrial response — is that the verdict? Or is it just the profitable one?
Lila Soto: Mm — those might not be separable either. And the Australian Office actually gets at what's underneath that. Felicity Ward playing Hannah Howard, Steve Irwin references, backyard cricket replacing UK territorial army jokes. That's hyper-specific. And the specificity question is — actually, that's the part that gets complicated later, because there's a cost to building something that specific.
Iris Holm: Right. The more local it is, the less it can travel. Which means every remake we build might be terminal by design.
Lila Soto: Terminal is — yeah, that's the right word. And I'm not sure the industry has actually sat with what that means. The Australian Office, Hannah Howard, Steve Irwin, backyard cricket — that version is built for an Australian living room. It cannot travel to Canada without another eighteen months and another full rebuild. The specificity that makes it real is also what locks it in place.
Iris Holm: So every hyper-local version is a dead end commercially.
Lila Soto: Not a dead end — more like a ceiling. It works exactly once, for exactly one audience. And I mean, that's not nothing. But nobody's building the Australian Office because they think it'll sell back to America. They're building it because — I guess because 'authentic to one place' is the whole bet.
Iris Holm: And nobody's paying for that twice. Which is the cost the sources notice but don't resolve. Yo Soy Betty's twenty remakes look like success — and they are — but you've also just produced twenty terminal assets.
Lila Soto: Oh — I hadn't framed it that way. Twenty audiences each get something that feels theirs, and twenty production budgets disappear into it, and none of those versions talk to each other.
Iris Holm: Right. And now Netflix reports a third of its viewing in the first half of 2025 came from non-English titles. Which means there's finally an audience for foreign content — but the remake model isn't set up to serve it. Those viewers aren't watching remakes. They're watching originals with subtitles.
Lila Soto: Parallel audiences. Some watching subtitled originals, some watching the remake, and — actually, wait — none of them canceling the others out. They just coexist.
Iris Holm: Which means the exportability trap might be — look, it might be a design flaw we've stopped noticing because the domestic win is so clean. Felicity Ward as Hannah Howard lands perfectly in Sydney. Full stop. The cost is invisible until you try to move it.
Lila Soto: So is the question whether hyper-local is worth it — or whether we're building the wrong thing entirely and just calling it localization?
Iris Holm: I don't think we're building the wrong thing. I think we're running an experiment we didn't choose to run. Netflix, first half of 2025 — more than a third of viewing from non-English titles. That's not a niche. That's the audience telling the industry something, and the industry hasn't caught up to what it means for comedy specifically.
Lila Soto: Yeah — and the part that stays open is whether those viewers are actually getting the jokes. Like, are they laughing at the same thing the original audience is laughing at, or are they watching alongside the humor? Watching the shape of it without the full depth. And I mean — streaming is running that test live right now, with expanded subtitles and dubbing on TV devices, and nobody formally asked whether comedy survives that crossing at the same comprehension level.
Iris Holm: That's the question that doesn't resolve. And I keep thinking about demolition — where we started. You said the industry's answer is tear it down and rebuild local. But maybe streaming is the first real pressure on that assumption. Not proving it wrong. Just — testing it without a control group.
Lila Soto: Mm. Demolition turned optional. Or — maybe it just got a competitor.
Iris Holm: Good conversation.
