Felix Ortiz: Hey — did you ever watch Stromberg? The German one?
Tess Hollis: I know of it. Never sat down with it. Why?
Felix Ortiz: Because here's what's weird — it's an adaptation of The Office, the BBC original, and the reason it actually worked is that the producers basically dismantled everything. New setting, insurance office instead of paper company, rewritten character arcs, different rules for how conflict plays out. They took the format and kind of... broke it open. And it ended up being one of the most successful international remakes of that show anywhere.
Tess Hollis: Hold on — more successful than the NBC American version?
Felix Ortiz: In its market, yeah — and the American one is no small thing either, we'll get into that. But the American Office also rewrote heavily. Like, extensively restructured character arcs. The pattern is the same. So today's question is basically: what is actually being sold when a production company buys a TV format? Because the thing that makes Stromberg work is precisely what they didn't preserve.
Tess Hollis: Which means either the format is a kind of permission slip — not a blueprint — or producers are successfully figuring out something underneath it that nobody in the pitch room is naming out loud.
Felix Ortiz: Oh, I love that framing — a permission slip. Yeah, and the question is what exactly it's giving you permission to do.
Tess Hollis: That's the thing the fidelity conversation keeps stepping around.
Felix Ortiz: Right — but the part that doesn't fit is, like, why does the fidelity instinct survive at all? Because the data is just sitting there. Stromberg breaks the mold, the American Office rewrites heavily — and yet producers keep defaulting to: stay close. So something else is going on.
Tess Hollis: Okay, here's the click for me. A joke is a violated expectation. That's it. Full stop. And you can only violate an expectation your audience actually holds.
Felix Ortiz: Oh — wait, say that again slowly.
Tess Hollis: Think about a German viewer in 2004, sitting with a faithfully translated Office episode — the BBC original, word for word. The scene is about British redundancy anxiety. They follow every single word. They understand the plot. And they feel nothing. Not because they're missing vocabulary — because they don't carry the specific terror of that employment culture. The norm that's being violated just... isn't there for them. So the violation is invisible.
Felix Ortiz: So translation preserves the — yeah, the appearance of the joke. The shape of it. But it destroys the actual mechanism.
Tess Hollis: Exactly. And the wild thing is — linguistic proximity makes this worse, not better. Because when the BBC version became the NBC version, everyone assumed shared language meant shared context. But American middle management runs on totally different status hierarchies than British middle management. The words arrived fine. The reason the words are funny just... evaporated. Language was a trap.
Felix Ortiz: Wait, so the closer the surface looks, the easier it is to miss how far apart the actual — I mean, the cultural assumptions underneath actually are?
Tess Hollis: Yeah. And that's what the fidelity doctrine gets completely backwards. It treats closeness to the source as a safety net. But for comedy specifically, the source's cultural specificity is precisely what has to break for any joke to land locally. Stromberg didn't succeed despite dismantling The Office. It succeeded because dismantling it was the only way to rebuild the mechanism in a place where German workplace authority and employment anxiety are the live wire — not British ones.
Felix Ortiz: And that's what makes the fidelity doctrine so strange as a business decision — because it's not even working as a creative instinct, it's working as a... liability shield. Like, Norman Lear figured this out in the early seventies — he's adapting British sitcoms for American network television, systematically, and even then, fifty years ago, the hit-or-miss rate was wild. The instinct to stay close never actually resolved the problem. It just kept getting inherited.
Tess Hollis: Wait — fifty years of evidence and the doctrine survives?
Felix Ortiz: Right, and I think that's because fidelity isn't a creative strategy, it's a risk-aversion strategy. If you're faithful and the show bombs, you can point at the source. You honored it. If you rewrite heavily and it bombs, you're fully exposed. There's no defense.
Tess Hollis: Philip Rosenthal basically filmed that logic in real time.
Felix Ortiz: Exporting Raymond — yeah. 2010, Sony Television International, he's trying to adapt Everybody Loves Raymond for Russian TV, and you can watch him — on camera — resisting every suggestion to change something fundamental. And the Russian producers are pushing back like, this doesn't mean anything here. And he's stuck. Because changing it feels like losing the thing he's supposed to be protecting.
Tess Hollis: So the document of the friction is also a document of the instinct.
Felix Ortiz: Exactly — and what's wild is this scales way past scripted drama. The format trade in the nineties and two-thousands, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Idols, these shows were constituting huge chunks of primetime on private broadcasters internationally. The fidelity tension wasn't a boutique comedy problem anymore — it was a recurring industrial problem with actual financial stakes every time a format crossed a border.
Tess Hollis: Which means glocalization — that whole tension between the global template and local specificity — that's not an academic word for it. That's just the business running into itself over and over.
Felix Ortiz: Yeah — and honestly the part I want to get into next is whether the skeleton that's supposedly being protected even exists as a real thing. Like, what did Stromberg actually keep? Because that question might make everything we just said about fidelity way more complicated.
Tess Hollis: But that's exactly — Stromberg kept the documentary-style shooting and the workplace ensemble, and we're calling those two things the skeleton. But couldn't you argue those are surface too?
Felix Ortiz: Oh — wait, like, the mockumentary frame is just... aesthetic?
Tess Hollis: Maybe the actual skeleton was never format-shaped at all. Maybe it was just — uncomfortable people in a room together. That works anywhere if you get the local awkwardness right. Which means 'format' might be a useful myth more than a real portable object.
Felix Ortiz: Okay but — no, actually, that can't be the whole answer, because the BBC Office was 12 episodes. Twelve. The NBC version ran 201. And that's not padding — American audiences expected full sitcom character arcs, relationships that resolve, growth across seasons. British audiences didn't need that. So they weren't even operating on the same structural logic, even though everyone kept saying it was the same format.
Felix Ortiz: Same format. Completely different skeleton underneath it, basically.
Tess Hollis: So language proximity masked how structurally far apart they were. Nobody saw it because the words were English both times.
Felix Ortiz: Right — and if the boundary between skeleton and surface is that blurry even between the BBC and NBC versions, then producers are literally breaking material without a map. There's no definition of what must survive. The scholarship calls it fidelity as interseriality — like, fidelity isn't closeness to one source, it's this whole web across versions, national contexts, production histories. Which means there's no fixed thing to be faithful to.
Tess Hollis: And that's where national identity articulation comes in — the successful adaptations aren't preserving a skeleton, they're actively interpreting what's distinctive about the new culture. Ghosts on CBS gets cited as one of the biggest shows on American TV right now. That's not preservation. That's closer to invention wearing a format's name.
Felix Ortiz: And that's — yeah, that's the part I can't put down. Because if Ghosts CBS is 'invention wearing a format's name,' then what the format trade is actually selling is... permission. Not a portable comic logic. Just permission to try. The skeleton might be a useful fiction that gets the deal across a desk.
Tess Hollis: Successful remakes don't preserve the format. They understand the original well enough to kill it. Stromberg kept almost nothing — documentary frame, workplace ensemble — and rebuilt the mechanism from German anxiety up. That's not adaptation. That's reverse-engineering.
Felix Ortiz: Right — but then the honest question is, if fidelity is the wrong measure, what's the right one? And I don't think the industry has an answer. I'm not sure the scholarship does either.
Tess Hollis: No. And I think that's actually where it sits. Unanswered.
Felix Ortiz: Good place to stop, then. This one earned the quiet ending.
