Greetings over your interweb devices
“What we need in the world today
Is a guide for the married man
Some simple thing that in every way
Would provide for the harried man
Help him not to worry
Assist him to relax
Help him slow his heart rate
And spare him cardiacs.”
Adapting US sitcoms around the globe was a fascinating experience. Finding the secret to success in each country was in discovering the common ground in the premise which were true in all situations. Perhaps that explains why “The Nanny” proved to be such a safe bet in most countries. At its core, it was a Cinderella meets the handsome prince story, a timeless fable with similar variations found in many cultures.
But the tricky part was in the fine adjustments needed to make the stories work in each particular country. I chose the Cairo “Everybody Loves Raymond” kitchen scene above in part, because it showed the back entrance to the flat in the main set. For those who know the original series on which this project was based, you know that the Barone families lived in houses across the street from one another and as family felt free to walk in on each other at will (hence the clever title in the Arabic version which effectively translated to “Close Doors”).
In that version, the first challenge was that people in Cairo tend to live in apartment flats, not houses — and so the logical compromise was that they lived in the same building. However, front doors don’t have knobs only keyed locks (and so can’t really be left UNlocked), so it made no sense to have them across or down the hall. Since so much of the comedy is based on sudden unannounced entrances, they decided that if this mom and dad lived a floor or two downstairs there could be an adjoining service stairway and different kinds of doors.
That general solution wasn’t quite right for a specific episode in which the Robert character (the brother) was supposed to barge in and interrupt the Ray and Debra characters in an intimate moment on the couch. To make the comedy work, proximity between the door and couch were important which ruled out the back door solution. In order to work for the front door, our local writer doing the adaptation added a doorbell. Unfortunately, that changes the joke from one of frustration AND embarrassment to one of just frustration. A good joke, but not as good as the original (comedy writers call this lessening of a joke, a “punch-down” — as opposed to a “punch-up,” which is an improvement on a joke). I appealed to our wonderful head writer, Motasem Ali (or as I called him, “Big T”), to try to figure a way to save both parts of the joke. Big T offered that it really would not be a good idea for the Robert character to so embarrass his brother. I kept at it and pushed that perhaps we could move the couple off the couch to near the back door, allowing then for the barge-in. Big T gave me that polite, but firm look that I wasn’t really following what he was trying to impart. He went on to explain that it would be such an affront for one brother to catch the other “in flagrante” that, well, blood could flow. Blood . . . definitely not funny. We went with the doorbell, one laugh is better than none.
To one and all, Be Safe-Stay Healthy