MovieChat Forums > Cordon (2014) Discussion > Screening on BBC

Screening on BBC

posted 9 years ago by Gore-Girl
5 replies | jump to latest

This Belgian show is currently screening on BBC 4, in Dutch with English subtitles. As a euro tv addict, I recognised the plot immediately- the idea for this show is totally stolen from a German mini-series from 2002, called "Pest - Die Rückkehr" (tr. as The Return of the Plague):
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0311640/
The German mini-series ran to about 3 hours, the Belgian copycat version has been blown up to run for 10 episodes of about 50 minutes each... all the plotpoints are the same, they just changed the disease from the Plague to Avian Flu. And threw in some dodgy xenophobic reasons for the contamination, from refugees smuggled into the country in containers.
I guess they thought 12 years was long enough ago to rehash the same story! 😒

[–] ib011f9545i 9 years ago

you assume they knew about the German thing and copied the story?
Even if they did there is not really such a thing as a 100 per cent original story.
You might be right of course but someone who studies fiction could probably come up with examples before the German story.

The most attacked BBC showed some German tv films back in the 1980s would like to see more from Germany.

[–] asiamatron 9 years ago

That particular plot is not new and it has been done before, I doubt it was stolen from a little known German TV show. Movies and TV shows borrow from each other all the time, it is quite rare to get a movie or TV show with a completely original plot.

[–] buchowski 9 years ago

"And threw in some dodgy xenophobic reasons..."

You clearly haven't watched the show.

[–] Anhun 8 years ago

I read a synopsis of Return of the Plague, and I completely disagree that Cordon stole the story. Yes, there's an outbreak. Yes, there's a love story thrown in the mix. Both of those elements have been used before. There are also a lot of differences between the two stories. You could just as easily argue that Return of the Plague stole their ideas from the 1950 film Panic in the Streets.

"You two ought to be ashamed of yourselves . . . two grown men acting like . . . grown men!!!"

[–] tenant13 8 years ago

Does anyone know when season 2 will be on BBC? It's coming back in Belgium in a week or so.