That said, there are plenty of areas where CBS’s Ghosts doesn’t outright ignore the British show, but doesn’t replicate it verbatim either. The two most obvious cases are Trevor and Isaac, who are loosely based on the original show’s Julian and The Captain.
The Captain and Isaac aren’t all that similar despite their shared backstories, with The Captain acting comically self-serious while Isaac is pretty shamelessly self-serving. Similarly, while they both died in similarly embarrassing ways, Trevor and Julian share some pivotal differences. Julian’s backstory makes him less sympathetic than Trevor, which is impressive considering Trevor’s origins.
While Trevor was an amoral stockbroker with a playboy lifestyle, Julian was a corrupt politician who constantly cheated on his wife.
This darker style of storytelling explains why CBS’s Ghosts has Flower and the BBC series doesn’t have an equivalent character, since its sense of humor is slightly more bleak. As such, it was a clever choice for the U.S. sitcom remake to jettison many of the elements of the original show that didn’t translate well. Like The Office, Ghosts transcended its origins as a remake and built an identity of its own after finding inspiration in an earlier hit.
