‘Mammoth’ Remake Greenlit at Fox
Look at what the success of 'Best Medicine' hath wrought.
We here at Telly Visions pride ourselves on covering British TV on American streaming – including shows that are being produced in the U.K. but haven’t gotten American distribution yet. But we don’t cover everything – what we attempt to do is find the shows you, our readers, are going to want to watch.
Despite what PBS might have you think, the BBC is not a channel filled with nothing but high-end comedies and sumptuous period dramas. There’s a lot of dreck, same as American television, some of which sticks around long enough that we eventually mention it, and some that wind up on the cutting room floor over and over, because when choosing between it and something else, something else is always better looking.
Such is the case with Mammoth, a comedy that Lacy once said was proof that “too many dudes run networks.” The series – created, written, and starring Mike Bubbins – focuses on a character by the name of Tony Mammoth, a PE teacher from 1979 who is accidentally frozen during an avalanche on a school skiing trip, only to be found and thawed out in 2024, turning him into a minor celebrity. Fish-out-of-water-style comedy ensues as Mammoth – a fossil from a time when bigotry was totally normal – runs face-first into our new “woke” society, where women demand completely unbelievable things like basic respect, and being racist in public is no longer socially acceptable.
....oh, wait. Hold on. (Touches earpiece)... I’m being told that racist pogroms and a complete removal of women from the workforce are currently underway in 2026...
You can see why we chose to skip this one.
Unfortunately for everyone, Fox (the Murdoch-owned broadcast network left over from the sale of 20th Century to Disney in 2019) saw the success of remaking Doc Martin as Best Medicine and decided the perfect follow-up would be... an American remake of Mammoth.
There are a few mitigating circumstances, starting with the fact that (unlike Best Medicine) the Mammoth remake is not being done by the same team as the original show. Instead, Christopher Lloyd and Danny Zuker, best known for the 2010s hit Modern Family, will be spearheading the series.
On the one hand, this is very good news for the show’s already limited chances of survival. The reason that Best Medicine is a success – where so many British remakes have failed – is that the show stuck to the same method as the U.S. version of Ghosts. The creative team behind the U.K. version came over and created an Americanized version, working in tandem with local writers to ensure the new show’s tone felt right. With a new creative team, the chances that Mammoth will follow in Best Medicine’s successful footsteps fall sharply.
On the other hand, no one with two brain cells to rub together would want the original show’s tone to carry over, certainly not if they actually want anyone in the U.S. to watch. Either way, this is one we won’t be covering.
Mammoth does not yet have a cast, and filming on the Fox remake is not expected to start until 2027. We can only hope extinction will be mercifully quick.
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Meanwhile, the original series was recently greenlit for Season 3 on the BBC, but as of yet, BritBox has not inflicted it upon us, and hopefully, it never will.
