...by a common language, is how Winston Churchill is alleged to have described the United States and Great Britain. I am beginning to think their ways of producing television are also the same, but different.
Most of the genres of TV we are familiar with in the US are equally popular in the UK: sit-com, soap opera, detective/police, game show, talk show, reality/competition. (It could be argued that last really started in the UK and migrated here, unlike most of the others.) But the way they handle them is very different.
First of all, there is no "season" in the sense we mean in broadcast TV in Britain--no sudden influx of new material on all channels in the fall with shows running 20 to 24 episodes until the early spring. No, over there, the new "series" (as they call it) is as likely to begin in March as in September--and it might run fewer than 5 episodes or as many as 30 (depending on the genre). And, whether the show is on non-commercial BBC or one of the commercial channels, there seems to be no set running time. It might be as little as 25 minutes or as much as 90...or virtually anything in-between.
The style of the shows can be quite different as well. Though not as violent as most American crime dramas, the British ones tend to be more grim...so much so, that Jill and I find we cannot "binge" them in the sense of watching an entire season in a night or even a week. Of course, there are some lighter-hearted ones, such as Rosemary and Thyme or Shakespeare & Hathaway.
Game shows often seem to be a strange combination of quiz and celebrity panel/talk show...even to the point of taking one from each and combining them as in 5 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown.
In these days of pandemic and lockdown--and having switched from cable to streaming--we're watching a lot more Brit TV these days in our house. If you're doing the same--what do you watch?
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