‘BEING HUMAN’
Mondays, 8 p.m., SyFy
These days, it’s looking like if you want a half-ass decent American TV show, you have to go looking in Britain for the raw material. As we wrote last week, “Skins,” the deliciously raunchy UK show about drugged-out and horny (read: normal) high school students, recently jumped the pond to land as a new U.S. version on MTV. Then there’s NBC’s “The Office,” which was a well-regarded British show well before Steve Carrell got hold of it. The latest transplant from Mother England is the supernatural/sci-fi show “Being Human.” We’ve caught the original a few times on BBC America, and it’s a whole lot of fun. Basically “Three’s Company” with death and bloodsucking, it features the adventures of 20somethings Mitchell, George and Annie, roommates who are a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost, respectively. While the show goes a lot deeper than who left the cap off the blood jug again and whether or not the werewolf should pay the full cost of getting his wiry hairballs snaked out of the tub drain, at its heart, it’s a moving treatise on the perils of being different. Though the transfer process from British TV to American TV isn’t always smooth (witness the always-brilliant UK version of car-church automobile show “Top Gear,” versus the dull, dismal and stupid U.S. version of the same) we’ve got high hopes for the SyFy turn. The bones are there. All they have to do is not screw it up.