Alan Ball taking a turn at adapting British women in prison soap "Bad Girls"

For the last couple years, the hot trend among the American TV networks was finding a British series with an original voice and try to bring stateside. A long list of series (including Footballers' Wives, The Thick of It, Life on Mars, Viva Blackpool!, Suburban Shootout and Mile High) were being developed for US audiences. In the end, all that hype ended up giving us only Viva Laughlin and ABC's upcoming Life on Mars.

However one of those series, Bad Girls now has American Beauty writer and Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball leading an adaptation for HBO.

The original Bad Girls, a soap opera set in a women's prison, comes from the same team that also gave us Footballers' Wives (including out writer Maureen Chadwick) and had a reputation for mixing gritty realism with campy sensationalism. It tackled issues faced by women-in-prison such as pregnancy, drug addiction and sexual assault (as well as a landmark lesbian romance) while staying highly entertaining -- a balance also found on Footballers' Wives.

With a little bit of thought, it seems a natural fit for Ball who gave us such richly drawn characters and memorably odd plot twists on Six Feet Under as well as the camp sensibility of American Beauty. Plus, I like hearing that the American Bad Girls will also have an openly gay writer working on it.

From where I'm looking the only problem I see is that Ball will need to give Bad Girls a voice that'll make it more than the "female Oz" that most TV critics will initially use describe it.