>>>>>>>BTW, do you lot use the expression "pratt", meaning an "pathetic idiot"? Many people here with the surname Pratt (like the dr in ER) would have it chaged by deed poll.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>By the same token, if a Texan says to you "Git!" he is asking you to move along, not assessing your character <s>
>>>>>
>>>>>I've seen enough westerns to know that :-)
>>>>
>>>>And in meeting the parents of both Texan and English girls I was dating I was exposed to the alternative meanings ... <s>
>>>
>>>Traditionally, from an old TV sit com (Till Death us do part), there was a Liverpool (Scouse) character, played by Tony Booth (Cherie Blair's dad), who the cockney star, Alf Garnett, used to call "you Scaaaaas git". I've had that all my life :-)
>>>
>>>That series was exported to the USA and repackaged as "All in the Family" with Archie Bunker for Alf Garnett.
>>
>>Tony Booth is Tony Blair's father in law ? Cool. ( in Wikipediaing to get a picture found out "His great-great-grandfather Algernon Sydney Booth was the uncle of John Wilkes Booth, the actor who assassinated Abraham Lincoln" ( Dying is easy - Comedy is hard )
>
>And it's very easy to "die" doing comedy. So the Booth family has been meddling in politics for quite a while (you may recall all the political arg's in TDUDP). If you look at a pic of Tony Booth, esp. when he was young, youy can so see Cherie's features in him.
>
>>
>>Just put the first Til Death DVD on my Netflix list - and then remembered I had also been meaning to add the Brit ( original ) Men Behaving Badly.
>
>You have a US version of MBB? I never got into that really.
>>
>
>>Has the American version of The Office become available over there? As a fan of both Gervais and Carrell I'd be curious to see how the American version plays there. I really think they both are brilliant ( though it is interesting a "season" on BBC is six episodes while here it is 22 or 23 so while there are only 12 original episodes of the Brit Office there are 60+ of the American version so far )
>
>Sure it has, long time ago. Not bad but the reason why the Brit series was short is cos it was uspposed to be a fly-on-the-wall docu, which I don't think the US version is aspiring to be (at least not by now). I noticed the proliferation of epos in the US version and I thought, like all US sit coms (which are all usually very good, far better than Brit ones), they're going to kick the arse out of this one till it's dragging its sorry moribund @ss through the ratings. Now the US Office is on digital TV here and I can't be bothered, or don't have the time, to get involved in any more TV than I already do, so I can't judge thses later epos not originally by Gervais.


Part of the reason is syndication. The popular American shows can make a fortune in syndication after (or even before) the end of the series. There have to be at least 100 episodes before a show can be syndicated.

That said, TV seasons have become a lot shorter than they used to be. When I was a kid most shows had 39 new episodes per season, with just the summer off. Then it became 26, and now it's even fewer.