Fall TV: Remade in the USA

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CBS's The Ex List (Fridays, 9 p.m. E.T.; debuts Oct. 3) is adapted from a show in Israel, which earlier this year gave us HBO's therapy drama In Treatment. In this dramedy, emphasis on the -medy, single gal Bella Bloom (Elizabeth Reaser — and, yes, Bloom owns a flower shop) throws a bachelorette party and gets thrown for a loop when the bridal party visits a psychic. Bella, the clairvoyant says, will get married within a year, to one of her ex-boyfriends — but if she doesn't find him in that time frame, she will never marry. (Some prophets speak in parables; this one speaks in high-concept-series pitches.) Each episode she tracks down one ex to see if he's the one.

This My-Name-Is-Girl concept may be outlandish, but Ex List is also fresh and raunchily funny (there's a scene in the pilot comparing feminine-waxing choices to historical figures — the "Hitler," the "Gandhi"), and Reaser is winning and adorable. If you can check your skepticism at the psychic's bead curtain, it's a charming, funny, undemanding escape — a sort of romantic procedural. Any praise for the show needs an asterisk, though, because the original producer-writer, Diane Ruggiero, recently quit in a creative dispute with CBS, which she said resisted the changes she wanted to make from the original Israeli series.

That brings us to the major challenge of Americanizing many of these shows, which is not so much cultural as structural. Like our restaurant portions and children, we make our TV bigger in the States. Where an overseas series may run a dozen or so episodes in its entire life, an American show will air 22 or more a season. So plots must be stretched out and subplots multiplied. This is not automatically bad; the American version of The Office fleshed out a stronger supporting cast, made its central character more multifaceted and found its own voice. Other adaptations find that once they run out of source material, they've got nothing.

The fall's most promising import is also the most potentially susceptible to this problem. The premise of ABC's Life on Mars (Thursdays, 10 p.m. E.T.; debuts Oct. 9) is ludicrous but irresistible: New York City cop Sam Tyler (Jason O'Mara) gets hit by a car and does a reverse Rip Van Winkle, coming to 35 years ... earlier. Inexplicably trapped in 1973 (he awakens wearing a collar with the wingspan of a 747), he returns to his precinct, tries to get his bearings and eventually finds himself working on a case directly connected to the one he was working on when he was run over.

Is he alive? Is he insane? Can he come home? And what does it all have to do with the David Bowie title song? We don't know, and the pilot doesn't bother making it plausible, but it does play up the time-travel culture-clash aspects for all they're worth. Even the predictable situations — Sam mentions his cell phone to a cop who answers, "You need to sell what?" — pay off. (A more somber, striking moment: Sam looks up after he comes to and sees the gleaming new Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.) But the real fascination is how the show plays off the techno-expectations about police work that CSI has bred into us. With no computers or lab work, Sam has to chase his case '70s-style, with shoe leather and — as his new boss, Lieutenant Gene Hunt (Harvey Keitel), demonstrates — a healthy disregard for search warrants.

Life on Mars should bring viewers back for a second episode, but the highly praised British original resolved its story in only 16 episodes. Can this American Life avoid becoming ridiculous stretching the story out over dozens of episodes? It will depend on how well it rethinks the closed-ended British story line. In the end, successful foreign-transplant shows are not really "imported"; they immigrate. Eventually, they need to learn a new dialect and new mores. If they succeed — like Archie Bunker and all TV's other Ellis Island inductees — they'll have to find a way to adapt, take root and thrive in their new home country.

(See TIME's 10 Worst TV Spin-Offs here.)