Stath’s award winning Marmite for the US
Channel 4’s Stath Lets Flats is one of those absurdist sitcoms that can best be described as Marmite – you either love it or you hate it. Fortunately for the creator and star, Jamie Demetriou, BAFTA judges were on the love it side. Now Fox is making a version for the USA called Bren Rents being written by Joe Mande, who wrote The Good Place.
Stath Lets Flats centres around a London based Greek Cypriot family owned letting agency, Michael & Eagle. The business is owned by his father which explains why the incompetent Stath has a job. Played by creator Jamie Demetriou alongside his real life sister, Natasia Demetriou.
Jamie Demetriou wrote the first three episodes of the show with Friday Night Dinner creator Robert Popper, and wrote the rest of the episodes for season one and two by himself. The series is produced by Roughcut Television, the company run by Ash Atalla — who guided Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s The Office to British screens.
Demetriou said at a recent virtual BAFTA event. “Everyone on the show on the surface is very stupid, but I think it’s trying to capture a general goodness and sweetness about a lot of people I grew up with, people I went to school with, people who sort of I don’t know — it’s more just like general personality types you see over and over again and you see, they’re generally seen as flawed but it’s kind of like tapping into the goodness of them,”
Fox Entertainment, also behind a U.S. remake of This Country with Jenny Bicks’ and Paul Feig, is the studio for the project, which has a script commitment.
Joe Mande the scriptwriter for Bren Rents also starred in Modern Family, will also exec produce, while Demetriou and Ash Atalla, who runs Roughcut TV, the production company that produces the show, are also Executive Producers. Mande was a writer for the final three seasons of Parks and Recreation and also appeared in a number of episodes. He has also written for Kroll Show and was a producer on Aziz Ansari’s Master of None.