Can 'Little Britain' be a big hit at America's Emmys?

Back in ole Blighty, the duo of David Walliams and Matt Lucas — a.k.a. "Little Britain" — won a pair of BAFTAs for best comedy program or series (2004, 2005) as well as best comedy performance (2005). Now they are hoping to translate this success with an Americanized version of their sketch comedy show: "Little Britain USA" — debuting on HBO tonight (Sunday, 10:30 p.m. ET).

While the Emmy Awards race for outstanding variety, music or comedy series used to be full of such weekly skit-based shows, in more recent years the category has been dominated by the daily shows like, well, "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart," winner six years running. The last weekly satire to make it into the race was another UK import on HBO back in 2005: "Da Ali G Show" with Sacha Baron Cohen portraying a variety of oddball interviewers including Borat.

Reviews for "Little Britain USA" ranged from raves to pans. Robert Bianco of USA Today enthused, "Think of 'Monty Python' with fewer people, even more drag, and latex fat suits, and you'll get the idea behind the marvelously talented Matt Lucas and David Walliams' comedy revue." What you won't get from that description is the cheeky, modern effrontery of their humor, or their ability to mock their characters while keeping us on their side — from the desperate-to-be-remembered eighth man on the moon to the angelic little girl who talks like a longshoreman.

And Matt Roush of TV Guide raved, "Reprising the format and some of the characters from their outrageous BBC hit 'Little Britain,' sketch-comedy masters Matt Lucas and David Walliams embark on a howlingly funny freak-show tour of America. It’s all very rude and often tremendously grotesque, but it's a belly laugh a minute. The wacky skit in which Rosie O'Donnell is abused by a wickedly chipper weight-loss instructor (“Are you fat because you’re a lesbian or are you a lesbian because you're fat?”) had me in stitches. My score: 9."

Alynda Wheat of Entertainment Weekly cautioned: "Jumping into 'Little Britain' with the U.S. version is like kicking off a Charlotte Brontë book club with 'Villette.' The material's solid, but it won't convince the newbies. Huge in its native land, Britain leaps to HBO with new characters (we dig the ambiguously gay bodybuilder duo), returning faves, and American guests like Rosie O'Donnell. Funny, but better material ships next week, so hang on."

Mary McNamara of the Los Angeles Times was less impressed, saying the show "is British satire at its broadest, nodding far more energetically to Benny Hill than to, say, P.G. Wodehouse. And there is humor to be had and insights to be made in the outrageous. A series of skits involving a woman (Walliams) and the 'demands' of her sexually sadistic dog are an amusing and ruthless take-down of the anthropomorphization of pets. But too often whatever pointed observation about American or British society Lucas and Walliams have in mind, whatever message about our hypocritical social mores and behaviors they're trying to send, gets lost in the adolescent guffawing about fat people and primary sex characteristics."

And James Poniewozik of Time said, "While I know the show has avid fans, this version leaves me cold much like the original does. As I wrote before, the sketch show is basically a collection of premises — some of them hilarious — that become less effective with each repetition. Picking up these characters and moving them to the States (some very incongruously, like chavette Vicky Pollard) doesn't make them any fresher."

(HBO)