'Peep Show' with a twist coming soon

Cult favourite Peep Show is set to be remade for American audiences, but the lead roles are being given a gender shake-up.

First screened in the UK in 2003, the comedy starring David Mitchell, Robert Webb and Olivia Colman, followed the exploits of flatmates Mark and Jez as they stumbled from one deliciously awkward social situation to the next.

Previous attempts to remake Peep Show for US audiences have failed to fly but now Sam Bain, one of the original show's creators, has revealed that FX Networks is developing a version of the show with two female leads playing the loser mates.

In an essay for The Guardian which centred on developing diversity in comedy, Bain wrote that he and fellow creator Jesse Armstrong felt some compunction about the role they'd written for Sophie (played by now-Oscar winner Colman) in the original series.

"When it started to become clear just how talented Olivia was, Jesse and I had a twinge of regret that Sophie had been sketched out pretty thinly as Mark's love interest. We tried to amp her up by bringing out the more extreme sides of her character," he wrote.

But Bain acknowledged that "the best way of building gender inclusivity into scripts is to get women to write them".

"What would Peep Show have been like with women as the two leads? It's a great question — and it's one I'll shortly have the answer to, because there is a script in development for a US Peep Show with two female leads. It's at FX Networks and it will be written by top comedy brain Karey Dornetto (Portlandia, Community)."

This article was first published on nzherald.co.nz and is republished here with permission