On January 22nd, Shawn Ryan (The Shield, Terriers) takes us down to tropical Belize for an edge-of-your-seat survival series on Amazon - Mad Dogs

Starring Ben Chaplin, Michael Imperioli, Romany Malco, and Steve Zahn, Mad Dogs follows four old friends on a vacation to paradise that turns into a trip from hell. Dangerous drug dealers, killer cats, and voodoo are not what these hapless, middle aged college buddies had in mind when they headed to the beach to visit their rich, retired-young friend (Billy Zane).As an American remake of a hit U.K. series, this Mad Dogs is actually a collaboration between Ryan and original show creator, Cris Cole. A creative endeavor that both thought would be worthwhile if it "could become its own unique, original thing," as Ryan put it at the TCA Winter Press Tour, where he, Cole, and the cast appeared for a Q&A session."I’d been very impressed with the British series," Ryan said, "and Cris and I had been talking about this. And then, when the opportunity came up to do this, I asked him, I’m not really in the business of remaking something I think that works; why would we do this? And Cris really felt that there were opportunities to improve things. There were different roads that he wished he had the opportunity to go down on the British series. And the first four episodes do bear a resemblance to the first four episodes in the British series. But once we get to episode 5 of the series, we’re in whole new virgin territory."Check out the trailer for Mad Dogs: Season 1...Cole added "I think the main difference is the British show was conceived as a four part miniseries, and we just did like kind of a four-part. We didn’t think it was going to go any further, and it did, which was great. But we only really sort of planned it to last for four hours. And going into this, we knew we had 10 hours of story to fill, so we could be a lot more ambitious with our story, a lot more complex with it. We can make the crime story more robust than perhaps it was in the British one and go a lot deeper into the characters than we were able to in the four hours of the British one."Also lending to the differences between the two series is the cultural variances between British men and American men."British men don’t talk," Cole explained. "We tend to internalize, I think, and American men externalize a little bit more. And I think American men are more in touch with expressing how they feel about themselves and each other. They’ll verbalize that in a way British men won’t. We’ll look at each other silently for much longer.""There’s a surface politeness that I think exists a lot in British culture," Ryan added. "I think resentments could be a little bit more buried. I think they surface a little bit quicker with American men. I don’t think there’s as much class distinction in American society."Ryan then spoke a bit more about what initial drew him to the series. "Part of the part of what intrigued me about this show," he said, " was that Cris always described it to me as 'farce noir,' which I loved as a term. And it became a guiding principle to us as we wrote the episodes. But to me, this is also a show about the uselessness of the American middle aged man. And how American men are sort of raised as kids with this idea of American exceptionalism and the idea of the American dream and things can be great and you can achieve things. And so to me, there’s almost something more crushing for American men in this story, because these are men who have hit a ceiling, who aren’t going to achieve the things that they were dreaming about doing when they were 20, 25, and who have all sorts of crushing disappointments in their life."

Additional reporting by Eric Goldman.Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN and a member of the Television Critics Association (TCA). Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at Facebook.com/Showrenity