12 TV Sitcom Remakes That Completely Bombed
5. Kings Of Van Nuys (ABC, 2012)
An idea that was in the works for a long time, this ABC-produced respray of seminal BBC sitcom Only Fools And Horses starring John Leguizamo and Dustin Ybarra as Del and Rodney worked about as well as Del Boy’s Taiwanese video recorder.
Kings Of Van Nuys keeps the general Fools And Horses formula but there are some things that it does differently. Del has an ex-wife (Wendi McLendon-Covey) who runs the local pub, Granddad (Christopher Lloyd) is an aging stuntman desperate for adventure, and Trigger (BJ Bales)... well, one of his lines is “Oh snap, I gotta bounce. I'm late for laser tag”. Let’s just leave it at that.
A problem that can be identified is that Van Nuys lacks the original’s dexterity. Rather than a carefully set-up plot like the propane-filled sex dolls or the luminous paint, it just leaps right in. In this pilot; rather than briefcases that Del later discovers can’t be opened, Trigger sells Del a DeLorean with monster truck wheels. And yes, there are a lot of Back To The Future jokes.
Apart from the stupid moments like ending with Del and Rodney having to fight a Truckasaurus knock-off in their DeLorean, Kings Of Van Nuys just seems aggressively bland. Everything from dialogue to characterisation to set design is so generic and 21st century sitcom that there’s absolutely no room for the kind of genuine spark that John Sullivan put into the original. And with that fundamental element missing, it’s no wonder that this never went beyond a non-broadcast pilot.