High street retailers Claire’s and The Original Factory Shop are being put into administration, risking 2,500 jobs.
It comes amid a turbulent time for Claire’s, popular with tweens for its brightly coloured accessories, which was seeking a buyer after its US owner filed for bankruptcy last year.
Modella Capital, which owns both chains, said the retailers would enter insolvency proceedings across the UK and Ireland. The administration will give them breathing space to find a new buyer.
Modella said tough trading conditions and “alarming” low Christmas trading left both in a “vulnerable” position.
Claire’s has 154 stores and 1,355 staff, while The Original Factory shop has 140 stores and 1,220 staff.
Modella purchased Claire’s in September, six weeks after its previous collapse into administration, in a deal which saw around 1,000 job losses at the retailer, while 145 stores closed.
The investment firm has owned The Original Factory Shop since early last year.
“This has been a very tough decision,” said Modella. “We have worked intensively in an effort to save both businesses, having made last-ditch attempts to rescue them, but neither has a realistic possibility of trading profitably again.”
Modella said that the chains were “highly vulnerable” even before it bought them. It also blamed challenges including the climate on the high street, which it said “remains extremely challenging”, and government policy.
The two shops are the latest casualties of a tough trading environment which has seen high street sales fall as shoppers move online, ditching old favourites facing the high cost of maintaining brick-and-mortar stores.
“A combination of very weak consumer confidence, highly adverse government fiscal policies and continued cost inflation is causing many established and much-loved businesses to suffer badly,” Modella said.
The investment firm has become increasingly prominent on Britain’s high streets, having bought WH Smith’s high street chain last year and taken over arts and crafts retailer Hobbycraft a year earlier.
Modella is the latest business to criticise measures by Chancellor Rachel Reeves which have seen operating costs rise, making trading even more difficult as high inflation – the price at which prices rise – squeezes household budgets.
Her last Budget hiked taxes, while her previous Budget increased the minimum wage and raised employer National Insurance contributions.
James Fitzgerald, landlord of the Thatched House in Hammersmith, said his costs have risen by £22,000 over the past year – with the increase in National Insurance a major factor.
It’s nothing new or extraordinary to remake a foreign TV show for a different country.
“All in the Family” was modeled on the British series “Till Death Us Do Part,” as “Steptoe and Son” became “Sanford and Son.” The popular CBS sitcom “Ghosts” comes from the show you can find retitled as “U.K. Ghosts” on American Netflix. The British mysteries “Professor T” and “Patience” (from Belgian and Franco-Belgian productions, respectively), have been successful on PBS. And there is, of course, “The Office,” which outlasted its original by many, many seasons and nearly 200 episodes. It doesn’t always work out (“Life on Mars”; “Viva Laughlin,” from “Blackpool,” which lasted a single episode despite starring Hugh Jackman; “Payne” and “Amanda’s,” two failed stabs at adapting “Fawlty Towers”), but there’s nothing inherently wrong with the practice.
The new Fox series “Best Medicine,” arriving Sunday as an advance premiere before its time slot premiere on Tuesdays, remakes the U.K. “Doc Martin,” previously adapted in France, Germany, Spain, Greece, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. For better or worse, I have a long, admiring relationship with the original, having signed on early and attended every season in turn — and interviewed star Martin Clunes three times across the run of the series (10 seasons from 2004 to 2022). And I am surely not alone. Unlike with most such remakes, whose models may be relatively obscure to the local audience, “Doc Martin” has long been widely available here; you can find it currently on PBS, Acorn TV and Prime Video, among other platforms — and I recommend that you do.
In “Doc Martin,” Clunes played a brilliant London surgeon who develops a blood phobia and becomes a general practitioner in the Cornwall fishing village where he spent summers as a child. He’s a terse, stiff, antisocial — or, more precisely, nonsocial — person who doesn’t stand on ceremony or suffer fools gladly, but who time and again saves the people of Portwenn from life-threatening conditions and accidents or, often, their own foolishness. A slow-developing, on-again, off-again love-and-marriage arc with schoolteacher Louisa Glasson, played by the divine Caroline Catz, made every season finale a cliffhanger.
Obviously, the fair thing would be to take “Best Medicine” as completely new. But assuming that some reading this will want to know how it follows, differs from or compares to the original — which was certainly the first thing on my mind — let us count the ways.
Josh Segarra, Josh Charles and Abigail Spencer in “Best Medicine.”
(Francisco Roman / Fox)
The names have mostly not been changed. For no clear reason — numerology, maybe? — Martin Ellingham is now Martin Best (Josh Charles); Aunt Joan is Aunt Sarah (Annie Potts), a fisherwoman instead of a farmer. Sally Tishell, the pharmacist in a neck brace, has become Sally Mylow (Clea Lewis); and distracted receptionist Elaine Denham has been rechristened Elaine Denton (Cree). Keeping their full names are Louisa Gavin (Abigail Spencer), father and son handymen Bert (John DiMaggio) and Al Large (Carter Shimp), and peace officer Mark Mylow (Josh Segarra). Portwenn has become Port Wenn, Maine. (Lobsters are once again on the menu.)
As in the original, Martin is hounded by dogs (no pun intended, seriously), to his displeasure; teenagers are rude to him, because they are rude teenagers. Mark Mylow is now Louisa’s recently jilted ex-fiance. Liz Tuccillo, who developed the adaptation, has added a gay couple, George (Jason Veasey) and Greg (Stephen Spinella), who run the local eatery and inn and have a pet pig named Brisket (sensitive of them not to name it Back Ribs); and Glendon Ross (Patch Darragh), a well-to-do blowhard who bullied Martin in his youth. Apart from the leads Charles and Spencer, few have much to do other than strike a quirky pose, though Segarra, recently familiar as school district representative Manny Rivera on “Abbott Elementary,” makes a meal of Mark’s every line, and Cree, who gets a lot of scenes and a personal plotline, makes a charming impression. Spencer is good company; Potts, whom I am always happy to see, is more an instrument of exposition than a full-blown character, and it feels a little unfair.
The first episode is modeled closely on the “Doc Martin” pilot, from Martin and Louisa’s antagonistic meet cute — in which he offends her, leaning in unannounced to examine her eye — to the episode’s main medical mystery (gynecomastia), a punch in the nose for our hero. Other details and plotlines will arrive, but there has been an attempt to give “Best Medicine” its own identity and original stories.
On the whole, it’s cuter, milder, more cuddly (multiple vomit jokes notwithstanding), more obvious and more whimsical, but less real, less intense and less sharply written than “Doc Martin.” The edges and angles have been sanded down and polished; tonally, it resembles “Northern Exposure” more than the show it’s adapting. Port Wenn (represented by the coincidentally named Cornwall, N.Y., with a wide part of the Hudson River subbing for the Atlantic Ocean) itself comes across as comparatively upscale; the doctor’s office and quarters are here plushly appointed, rather than spare, functional and a little shopworn.
As Martin, Charles stiffens himself and keeps his facial expressions generally between neutral and annoyed, though he’s softer than Clunes, less a prisoner of his own body, less abrasive, less otherworldly. Where Dr. Ellingham remained to a large degree inexplicable — the series expressly refused to diagnose him — Tuccillo has given Dr. Best a quickly revealed childhood trauma to account for his blood phobia and make him more conventionally sympathetic.
I freely admit that in judging “Best Medicine,” my familiarity with “Doc Martin” puts me at a disadvantage — or an advantage, I suppose, depending on how you look at it. But taken on its own merits it strikes me as a rather obvious, perfectly ordinary example of a sort of show we’ve often seen before, a feel-good celebration of small-town values and traditions and togetherness that will presumably improve the personality of its oddball new resident, as the townspeople come to accept or tolerate him anyway in turn. In the first four episodes, we get a celebration of baked beans, a town-consuming baseball championship and a once-a-year day when the women of Port Wenn doll themselves up and go out into the woods to meet a jacked, shirtless, off-the-grid he-man, right off the cover of a romance novel, who steps out of the forest, ostensibly to provide wilderness training. It’s like that.
All in all, “Best Medicine” lives very much in a television reality, rather than creating a reality that just happens to be on television. To be sure, some will prefer the former to the latter.
For “Malcolm in the Middle” fans and the Walt Disney Co., 151 episodes weren’t enough.
The beloved sitcom, which ran seven seasons on Fox in the early aughts, is returning for a four-episode arc on Hulu April 10. The reunion brings back such viewer favorites as Bryan Cranston as Hal, Frankie Muniz as Malcolm, Jane Kaczmarek as Lois, and a couple of Malcolm’s TV siblings.
The limited series — “Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair” — is set nearly 20 years after the original went off the air. Muniz’s character, Malcolm, is beckoned back to his dysfunctional family to help celebrate Hal and Lois’ 40th wedding anniversary.
Disney acquired the rights to 20th Century Fox studio programs after buying much of Rupert Murdoch’s entertainment assets in 2019. The deal gave Disney such blockbusters as “The Simpsons” and “Avatar.” Recently, the Burbank entertainment giant has dipped into the Fox vault to mine the trend of comfort food TV for millennials, boomers and Gen Z. Executives have watched nostalgic programming take off on streaming services, including Disney+ and Hulu.
Jane Kaczmarek as Lois, Bryan Cranston as Hal, and Erik Per Sullivan who played Dewey in the original “Malcolm in the Middle” on Fox.
(FOX)
A recent study from National Research Group found that about 60% of all TV consumed is library content.
The NRG study found that, among Gen Z, 40% of respondents said they gravitated to older shows because they are comforting and nostalgic. Disney’s own research has shown that a quarter of the shows young people list as their favorites were produced before 2010.
Disney’s ABC is also bringing back the quirky hospital sitcom, “Scrubs,” on Feb. 25. That comedy, set in the fictional Sacred Heart Hospital, will reprise the bromance between Zach Braff and Donald Faison’s characters, which the pair have recreated recently in T-Mobile TV commercials.
The show, which ran from October 2001 to March 2010, was also produced by 20th Television along with Bill Lawrence’s Doozer Productions.
Sarah Chalke will return, and John C. McGinley will guest star. The show will run on ABC, and a day later on Disney’s Hulu.
Most of the original “Malcolm” cast returns for the limited series except notably Erik Per Sullivan, who played Dewey. He’s no longer an actor so the part now is played by Caleb Ellsworth-Clark.
In the show, Malcolm has a daughter, played by Keeley Karsten, and a girlfriend, played by Kiana Madeira.
The Wilkerson’s classic mid-century house in Studio City, which served as an exterior for the show, reportedly was renovated years ago.
The original series ran on Fox from January 2000 to May 2006. Those episodes stream on Hulu.
Los Angeles Times’ former television critic, Howard Rosenberg, in 2000 called “Malcolm in the Middle” the “smartest, sharpest-written, most original comedy of the season.”
The reboot is produced by Disney Television Studios and New Regency. Linwood Boomer, who created the original series, also returned as writer and executive producer. Ken Kwapis directs the four episodes and also serves as an executive producer.
Beyond reviving the shows, Disney has also collaborated with advertisers to make throwback commercials to run in classic films on its streaming platforms and TV networks.
Staff writer Stephen Battaglio contributed to this report.
