Return of The Persuaders

While Granada International/Granada America is making loadsamoney with reality show concepts repackaged for the US market (such as Hit Me Baby One More Time, Nanny 911 and Hell's Kitchen), it's not stopping there. The increasingly powerful export/production arm of ITV is trying to horn in on the action in the action-adventure drama realm. And it's doing this by bringing back The Persuaders, a classic UK 1971 drama series produced by Lew Grade's ITC. The Persuaders, starring Roger Moore and Tony Curtis, was an expensive flop in the US (it only lasted one season), but it achieved a sort of kitschy cult status, along with other late 1960s/early 1970s ITC productions such as The Avengers, The Saint, and The Prisoner. (And according to Jeffrey Miller's Something Completely Different, these types of shows, all of which were shown on prime-time US network television, had a significant and lasting impact on the shape of American television.)

So the news that Steve Coogan and Ben Stiller are to star in a remake of The Persuaders has generated some excitement in the film & TV world on both sides of the Atlantic (see also here and here for more information). BBC America has also been doing its best to keep these classic cult shows alive, by showing them regularly as part of its Retro Shows season on Friday evenings.

Granada America is working with DreamWorks to bring the project to life. ITC, the original producer of the series, was bought by PolyGram in the mid-90s. Granada America's ability to feed America's "renewed appetite for shows from its in-house production arm" is becoming increasingly important to ITV, which, the Guardian notes, is suffering from declining audiences in the UK.