The British Are Coming (And Have Been for a While)

It’s time to discuss a painful but increasingly undeniable reality that I’ve come across during my hours of watching television lately.  So brace yourself, because what I’m about to say may offend, confuse or enrage you.

The British make better TV shows than we do.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m as patriotic as they come.  When I daydream, I think of football, apple pie, pickup trucks, guns, the American flag and freedom.  All at once!  And when I lay down after another day of being awesome, you can bet your ass I dream in color and those colors are red, white and blue.  If it weren’t illegal, I’d own a bald eagle and teach it to crow the National Anthem.

Now that my credentials have been well-established, let me get back to my point: the vast majority of our television is infinitely inferior to what’s coming out of Britain and it’s starting to piss me off.

I wish I could say that this was a recent development.  But it’s been the case for literally decades.  It’s only become more obvious with the advance of technology, which brought us the Internet, YouTube, Netflix — thus making it easier than ever to see TV shows from other parts of the world.

Going back to even before I was born, Britain produced Fawlty Towers, a hilarious, quirky, and ultimately brilliant TV show that only ran for about 5 seasons but is still considered one of the better shows to emerge from Britain to this day.

In fact, it seems that, rather than try to compete with the Brits directly, we are not above simply stealing their shows and creating our own Americanized versions for ourselves.  From Who Want to Be A Millionaire to The Office and Top Gear (among others) American television producers have shown little to no interest in creating something original  as much as they have seemed more interested in taking an original concept from overseas, hiring writers and actors to “Americanize” it, and then pat themselves on the back when it turns out to be a moderate success.  If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, those rosy cheeks on our friends across the pond must be due to all the blushing their doing over how much of their stuff we try to make our own.

While The Office has been a popular show here in the US, having seen the British version it is undeniable better, funnier, and ran shortly enough that they didn’t completely run out of story lines.  That’s another thing the Brits do better than us too, now that I think of it.  They have the good sense when to leave a show well enough alone.  The old showbiz rule is “leave the audience wanting more” and they seem to have mastered that concept long ago while American television producers will gladly run a show into the ground until it is a sad, washed-up version of what it once was.

 

While The Office has fans of both the BBC version and what we have here in the States, the biggest discrepancy in recent memory has to be between the BBC version of Top Gear and the USA version.  For those of you unfamiliar with the show, Top Gear is considered by many to be the best show in history that celebrates the automobile.  The BBC hosts Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond have long been part of the show that is equal parts talk show, automotive reviews, and ludicrous and hilarious stunts/challenges performed with everything from Formula 1 racing cars to rust buckets that barely qualify as a ‘car’ in the strictest sense.  The show is equally hilarious, exciting and fascinating and despite the somewhat ‘stilted’ nature of a lot of things going predictably wrong in very bad ways, the worst episode of the BBC version is probably better than the best version of what they turned it into over here.

 

 

In all fairness, we do happen to occasionally churn out some great shows from time to time and I don’t mean to completely dump on American shows.  But if we’re going to be innovators, create shows with meaning that are true to our nature as Americans, we have to quit trying to do impressions that will never measure up to the original.  It’s not only the right thing to do from a creative/artistic standpoint, but it’s also the American thing to do.  We didn’t get to be the best damn country in the world by following the lead of others, did we?  I think not.  So let’s collectively man up, get our creative juices flowing and remind the rest of the world why it sucks not to be us.

-Bill Henry