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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mel O&#039;Drama" data-source="post: 338863" data-attributes="member: 23">Honor Blackman is an actress I've grown to appreciate more and more over the years. As a child, Mona was probably my favourite Who's The Boss? character, and  I came down hard on Honor here for not being Katherine Helmond. As it turns out, this is exactly the reason Honor's character Laura is already making The Upper Hand so much fun. She has Helmond's playfulness, but feels more restrained than sassy Mona. Apparently Katherine Helmond herself appears in an episode later in the series. That could be fun (she's not playing Mona, which could have been even more fun if they wanted to get meta).Last night it struck me that Helmond could easily have been playing Tony's mother. They both have a similarly brash, outspoken air.In The Upper Hand, Laura and Caroline might be quite different in temperament, but one feels they come from the same class background.This made me realise that in addition to the whole gender role premise and the rich/poor thing going on in Who's The Boss?, the remake has the uniquely British added dynamic of class. Whereas Angela and Tony's stations are largely defined by their income and achievements, Laura, Caroline and Tom's received pronunciation puts them firmly in the upper middle class bracket, separating them further from what would at the time have been considered the "working class" regional accents of Charlie and Joanna (this would be very difficult to pull of in 2022 where contemporary RP is so widely used across the board). This makes a Charlie/Caroline pairing seem even more unlikely, which adds another layer to what I expect to be the slow burn of their relationship. Their eventual pairing seems inevitable, but their vastly different backgrounds make it also seem more unobtainable or even unwise. Because of this, it's easy to understand why the series would continue after the characters' marriage.It's the younger actors that really make the difference in terms of enjoyability and watchability for me.As a kid I really liked Alyssa Milano's character (put it down to the callowness of my youth), but my God: last night both Who's The Boss? kids grated like nobody's business with their knowing cutesy sitcom kid vibes. There's little as cloying as a precocious kid who is convinced of their own cuteness, and both have this in abundancee (Milano's Samantha has a smart-mouth thing on top of this, doubling up the irritation).The Upper Hand's kids were far more tolerable. At the time I knew Kellie Bright from the daft children's comedy series T-Bag and The Revenge Of The T-Set, from the year before The Upper Hand. I did find her a little precocious in that, which was hard to shake, but watching last night she comes across really well. Kellie, of course, is best known today for her long-running soap role in EastEnders. I've never seen her it it, but I've read good things (and it never fails to amuse me that her character is named Linda Carter).William Puttock as Tom is also a definite improvement on Danny Pintauro's Jonathan from Who's The Boss? Both actors feel inexperienced and amateurish, but young William seems to really get the attitude that's written into both characters, but which Danny - certainly as far as these first episodes go - failed to capture (rather like Danza, he seems to get by on embodying a single characteristic and riding it until the wheels come off).For me, the Brit who suffers most by direct comparison to their Who's The Boss? equivalent is Diana Weston. Had I not just watched WTB I'd probably find her fine, but compared directly with Judith Light, Weston feels a little weaker, and a tad too shrill at times. But watchable enough all the same.The little tweaks in detail to place each in their respective culture make it great fun to compare between episodes. Tony is a former boxer and baseball player who moves from Brooklyn to Connecticut, while Charlie is an ex-pro footballer who moves from Inner London to Henley-on-Thames. Angela's date in the Pilot requests a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, while Caroline's asks for toast and marmalade. Mistaking the date for a burglar, Tony brandishes a baseball bat, while Charlie appears with a Henley-appropriate cricket bat (I'm not sure if Tony being shirtless while Charlie keeps his t-shirt on is a cultural thing or simply Tony Danza demonstrating his range. Either way, it wasn't unwelcome). Since most UH episodes are adapted from WHB scripts I'll be keeping an eye out for Britishisms in future episodes and perhaps investigating to see if they've been "translated".As I said, I enjoyed Who's The Boss? greatly. Far more than I'd expected. I could quite happily have watched one or two more, but the very idea of binge-watching its entire run of almost 200 episodes seems, frankly, daunting-to-hellish. Perhaps in time the bloom will fall from The Upper Hand's rose as well, but after the first three episodes, I'm hopeful that the remaining ninety or so will be as easy and enjoyable to watch.</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?