A good remake of a British TV series?

NBC is airing an American version of the British comedy The Office, a faux documentary about a seriously dysfunctional workplace. So far, TV critics are saying the NBC version is actually good! But this sentence from a BBC article really grabbed my attention:

In the 1970s, US remakes of well-loved British series Till Death Do Us Part, Steptoe and Son, and Man About the House all became huge hits with American audiences.

But what were the remakes? I found out, thanks to Google (and the BBC): All in the Family, Sanford and Son, and Three’s Company. No kidding.

Theme park based on TV series

Lately my family has been watching a South Korean TV drama series called Dae Jang Geum, aka Jewel of the Palace. The main character is based on a real person, Seo Jang-Geum, who is the only female doctor for the king in Korea’s history. But so little is known about her real life that the producers made up most of the plot.

When it first aired, more than half of South Korea watched it, and now it’s sweeping across Asia like wildfire. Tourists from all over Asia are going to South Korea just to see Dae Jang Geum-related stuff. Now there’s a theme park based on Dae Jang Geum, which is the restored set where the series was taped. It’s somewhat like the lots at Universal Studios, but this park is based around one TV series. I can’t think of anything quite like it in the U.S.

New fonts, and new controversy, from Microsoft

This won’t be news to font fanatics, but anyway… Microsoft will be distributing six new fonts, called the ClearType Font Collection, that are optimized for on-screen reading. They will start shipping with various Microsoft products next year. But these fonts won’t be freely downloadable (unlike Microsoft’s Core Fonts for the Web, for a while). This makes them less likely to be widespread on Linux, and Apple hasn’t decided whether to license them for the Mac. You can bet that many web sites will soon “look best” on Windows. Too bad embeddable web fonts never took off.

Also, Microsoft commissioned Monotype to create a new font to be used in marketing material and as the new system font for Longhorn, the next version of Windows. The new font, called Segoe, looks a lot like Frutiger, published by Linotype. This isn’t the first time a Monotype font commissioned by Microsoft has looked so similar to a Linotype font. Others have pointed out the similarities between Helvetica and Arial, and between Palatino and Book Antiqua.

This led many fontophiles to conclude that Monotype and Microsoft teamed up to rip off Linotype once again. Others with insider info say that Microsoft never intended to commission a Frutiger clone, especially since Microsoft already has a license for Frutiger from Linotype, and is working with Monotype and Linotype to resolve the issue. And there are those who point out that Adobe’s Myriad is also close to Frutiger, but doesn’t give Frutiger due credit. But John D. Berry argues that if your goal is to create a vaguely humanist sans-serif typeface, the result is bound to look similar to Frutiger. Boy, it’s complicated.

KCBS is now webcast

This is more substantive than my previous KCBS posts (about the new jingle, etc.). KCBS started simultaneously streaming audio over the web today, along with 10 other Infinity radio stations. WCBS 880 started in December. I was pleasantly surprised, since Infinity (which is part of Viacom, the owner of CBS) has banned webcasts since late 1997, because there was no viable business model at the time; WCBS had to drop its RealAudio stream.

But a lot has changed in seven years. A lot more people are online, with higher-speed connections. Terrestrial radio stations now have more competition both from Internet radio and satellite radio. The radio stations can sell ads specifically for the webcast, boosting their revenue. Reception is less of an issue: webcasts allow WCBS and WINS to finally be heard within Manhattan skyscrapers.

Oh, and the head of Infinity who made the “no-streaming” policy is now the CEO of one of Infinity’s competitors, Sirius Radio.