Maybe other countries don't have to steal ideas to remake from the US because they simply run the US shows, I don't really know.

There are many US shows on German television, but we've also had our share of attempted remakes of US shows over the years, especially US sitcoms, and a couple of years back there was an attempt to establish a late night talk show à la Letterman - but all those 'remakes' went terribly wrong. Terribly wrong.

I feel it's partly because you can't really translate American shows into German, so to speak. I really think it's a cultural thing. In Germany, there is really no tradition of sitcoms, no matter how many tries there have been over time. Likewise with late night talk shows à la Letterman.

Life On Mars, at least that's what it feels like to me, is a very very British show. And it works as good as it does only because it's British. I can't really imagine it translated into American.
Add to that the fact that I'm such a big fan of John Simm as Sam Tyler in Life On Mars, and there's no way for me to work up interest in the US remake.

Some of you may know that there was a spinoff of Life On Mars on BBC earlier this year, called Ashes To Ashes.
It was about a female police psychiatrist, who gets injured and ends up in 1984 in London, working for the Metropolitain Police there, where she meats Gene Hunt, Ray Carling and Chis Skelton. Back in the present day, she'd read Sam Tyler's notes on his time in 1973, so she has a pretty good idea what happened to her. But she clashes with Hunt all the same.

At first, I was very reticent to watch this show, because it felt to me like just a lame rehash, like a selling out of the original idea. But in the end I couldn't resist, and I ended up enjoying it very much.
But I think the key here was that it was the same people as Life On Mars that did the show, Matthew Graham, Tony Graham and Ashley Pharoah. They managed to find new ways to further develop their idea - and the original characters from Life On Mars.