Mainstream productions drag in the masses but if it wasn’t for their adventurous cult parents, many wouldn’t exist at all, writes Melinda Houston.

Comparisons may be odious, but they’re inevitable. Especially when a beloved classic is used as the template for a mass- market remake. Commander in Chief premieres in Australia this week, the much-hyped drama starring Geena Davis as the first female leader of the free world (as US presidents like to style themselves).

Since the show began in the US in September last year, the predictable parallels have been drawn with that other political drama, The West Wing. Several have been unkind, and certainly there’s a deep familiarity about the new drama for anyone familiar with the old.

But it’s not the first to use the scaffolding of a successful cult hit to create mainstream fodder. Indeed, three of them are screening at the moment. You can draw a pretty straight line between Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Joss Whedon’s anarchic drama-comedy-horror about a cute girl who also happens to fight the forces of supernatural evil) and Charmed (about three cute girls - sisters - who also happen to fight the forces of supernatural evil).

Oz, the HBO series set entirely inside a maximum-security prison, is clearly a progenitor of Prison Break, a Fox series set entirely inside a maximum-security prison. And then there are our two life-as-President dramas. If they haven’t shared sets, they should have.

There’s no question the mainstream versions rate. Prison Break attracts about 10 million viewers a week in the US and is drawing solid numbers here; Charmed is now in its eighth season; Commander in Chief isn’t setting the world on fire but it has been generally well received by audiences in the States, and Davis recently took home a Golden Globe for the role.

Yet while the numbers indicate success, the various revamps fail to ignite the passions in the way the originals did. It’s hard to imagine the real inhabitants of the White House or Number 10 religiously sitting down to watch President Allen the way they did President Bartlet.

And Charmed has never generated the high-level academic attention that Buffy has (and does). More people are watching Prison Break than ever watched Oz. But with far less enthusiasm. When you convert a cult hit to a ratings success, the very changes that generate a broader audience seem to inevitably sap the idea of its vitality.

When you remake or rework someone else’s idea, you inevitably lose freshness. The first season of The West Wing was extraordinary viewing.

While a long-form drama about high-level politics seems a no-brainer in hindsight, it just hadn’t been done before. And it certainly hadn’t been done the way Aaron Sorkin did it, with that rapid-fire dialogue littered with one-liners that scattered Big Ideas like bagel crumbs.

Buffy was even more mind-bending. Even now the premise sounds ludicrous. (There’s this cheerleader, right? And her high school’s full of vampires?) And sure, we might have had Prisoner.

But we had not seen the uncompromising bleakness and brutality of Oz before - certainly not the small screen. The first time you experience something is always more thrilling. No remake or reworking can ever pack the same punch. But what the cult hits do is prepare the ground for the mainstream stuff. Fifty minutes discussing international politics? Well, sure.

Mainstream television must, to a great or lesser extent, have some appeal to the lowest common denominator. It must, by its nature, have mass appeal.

In the case of Prison Break that has meant providing a trillion times the budget allowed to Oz - it’s shot on film for a start, not video. It’s much prettier to look at. It has two bankably handsome stars.

And rather less appalling violence (although it has its moments and this week’s episode, Riots, Drills and the Devil, is pretty gruesome). Charmed also has the benefit of more dollars and, to begin with at least, the modest star-power of Shannen Doherty as a drawcard. And although West Wing never lacked either money or big names it was certainly never accessible TV: it took brain-aching attention and the aural abilities of a fruit bat to follow the dialogue. Commander in Chief covers the same territory, but you could leave the room, make a pot of tea and a batch of scones then do the dishes without losing the thread of the plot.

All three have had their edges softened. All three have been domesticated. Literally. Buffy had a mother. But then she died. Occasionally inmates in Oz were related but far from laying down their lives for each other, they were just as likely to shank each other in an ill-thought-out power-play. In the West Wing the key players barely had families.

They didn’t have time. President Bartlett’s were certainly present when the arc of the drama called for them - as a way to discuss race relations, or medical ethics, or the place of the modern working wife - but even the redoubtable Stockard Channing was on the sidelines. All three of the original templates were essentially about life without family, an anti-white-picket-fence world where everyone is fundamentally alone, and vulnerable.

But all three of the new generation absolutely invert that. They revolve around family: the brothers in Prison Break, the sisters in Charmed, the Allen-Calloway family in Commander in Chief. They might face the same kinds of problems - demons, unwanted sex, whether to invade North Korea - but none of these problems are as dire because there’s always your brother/sister/husband watching your back. You’re safe.

And when you recreate something to please the maximum number of people, you inevitably move further away from reality. Because reality isn’t resolvable in 50 minutes and it isn’t easily understood. What you lose is moral complexity.

And it’s that moral complexity that arouses the passions, that creates must-see TV, that encourages heated water-cooler conversations. Because real life is complex. And drama that attempts to replicate that is not comforting. It’s confronting. It makes us think - and argue - about the big stuff, whether that’s the nature of reality, what it means to be human, the mutability of ethics, or if it’s ever OK to assassinate a foreign leader.

But not everyone wants to be challenged by television. Most people don’t. They want to sit down at the end of the day - a complicated, unresolved, unsatisfying day - and slip into a soothing self-contained world where no matter how bad things seem at the 40-minute mark, you know it’s going to be OK by the time the credits roll.

And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But we need the cult shows too, the shows that people don’t get, that confuse them or repulse them, the shows that don’t rate, that attract an intense audience rather than a broad one.

Not least because they do pave the way for milder, more accessible remakes. Which even in diluted form give a mass audience the chance to view the world in a different way.