This post comes with a very big “my views may not be representative of my employer” sticker.
Channelsurfing in New York last weekend made me realise how very very lucky were are in the UK. We get the best television from the USA, filtered and aggregated – with none of the visual spam. Written about this before, but it’s suddenly a hot topic again amongst industry-leaders, with a leader on the very same subject in today’s Grauniad.
“He [Mark Thompson, CEO of the Uk’s Channel4] complains of British TV being “dull, and mechanical and samey” and looks enviously at the United States for complex modern TV, such as Six Feet Under or 24. The glib response to this is that the best place to watch American television is not over there but over here: because you can enjoy the comparatively small number of big creative successes, while avoiding the multichannel dross that goes with it.
The argument that we need more creative risk in British television – which Lord Puttnam drew attention to earlier this month – is important. (There is a case for saying that allowing US takeovers of British television companies, as the government would like, is more likely to produce extra outlets for existing US shows than nurturing indigenous talent.) But no one seems to know how to switch on this creative talent.”
Okay – well here’s a half-baked suggestion from someone who knows almost nothing about the TV industry. Clay and myself had a good debate about this when he was over in July.
It’s a structural problem.
In the USA, the ‘winner-takes-all’ nature of the TV industry means that all is risked on successfully ‘creating worlds’ – franchises that can live in syndication and other mediums.
The typical 22 episode (24, obviously in ’24”s case…) ‘season’ that US television has as it’s basic unit of commissioning means that rich, complex characters can be developed; sophisticated, intertwined story-arcs can be woven and worlds can be built
Compare and contrast if you will ‘Spooks’, which while trumpeted as an example of how Brit-TV can match the USA in terms of production values and ambition; failed miserably in terms of building characters*, story-arc and worldbuilding. Some of the writing was promising, so what would have been built if the creators had 22 episodes to paint their world rather than the measly 6 x 1 hour episodes that the BBC gave them?
The only British TV series I can think of doing this apart from soap-operas like Eastenders, are long-gone: The Prisoner, The Avengers and of course, The Doctor.
HBO‘s business model rests on the fact that people will only pay for stuff that is scarce – namely excellence: writing, acting and direction that is of an astounding quality. These factors plus the tendency that the rewards to creator-ownership of these franchises makes a market for quality that we simply cannot realise in the UK right now.
» The Guardian: Leader: “TV’s creative deficit”
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* apart from the terrific Hugh Laurie who played an insanely brutal and stylish head of MI6 worthy of the pen of Grant Morrison or Garth Ennis, the dramatis-personae of Spooks were bunch of wishy-washy second-hand soap-opera ciphers – Jack Bauer would have kicked the crap out of the whiny lead character in Spooks who’s name I can’t even remember without refering to the website in a nanosecond
Petafloptimism 
The “22 episode” line is put out a lot as an important difference, but it’s a symptom rather than a cause. Regularly, someone will try and do it in the UK, and then quickly hit the real problem: twenty two episodes on a UK budget isn’t possible.
Not because you can’t afford the episodes, but because you can’t afford to support the writers.
People go crazy writing 22 episodes – I know, because I’ve seen them. In the US, you cope with this by having a writing team, and a whole infrastructure behind the writing process that, at worst, is like a scriptwriting factory, at best an incredible temple of artistic discipline (ahem) – but always means you get those episodes.
Writers aren’t embedded like that in the manufacture of TV programs in the UK. In a lot of senses, this is a good thing: they’re much closer to being able to improvise and react and go down their own little holes. They’re also generally working alone or in pairs. There’s breadth to the possibilities.
But this also means that if you try and demand 22 episodes out of one or two people, they’ll just snap. And if you try and build up a team of writers to create your show, first you’ll have to pay more writers, then you’ll have to train them to work together well, then you’ll have to reengineer the production process around them, and then you’ll have to realise that – at least for the first dozen of times you do this – you’re just going to get sub-standard American-alike crap. Because that’s what inexperience with that process gets you – that’s what bad US TV *is*. You’ll just be trying to compete in exactly the same form with a machine that’s been doing it that way for decades.
The “Fifth Element” is one of my favourite films, because I really get the sense with it that Besson imagined what an action movie would be like, if all action movies were French. If you want to do long arc TV shows in the UK, they should be done like that: not mimicking the american output or process, but as though *all* long arc TV shows were British, and that’s how we’d always done them.
Curiously, of course, UK TV does have that structure: that’s what soaps are. And that’s what Dr. Who was. The problem, as you’ve identified, is that you need to rise above that in some way, otherwise you just end up with bad soaps.
Danny is right regarding structure. Dr Who didn’t have 22 episode seasons, it had short stories of between 2 and 8 episodes which were all strung together. Each story was, for the most part, self contained as a story although sharing a larger world setting.
Alternatives to that structure are the one-self-contained episode model, the frustrating “to be continued” double episode, and the epic-stories of 22 (24!) episode seasons.
The reason the “to be continued” double episodes are so damn frustrating is that you weren’t expecting the cliffhanger. Look at Dr Who though — every episode break within the miniseries was a cliff hanger, and we loved it. That was the magic structure, and I don’t know of any other series today that has it.
The Prisoner and The Avengers were produced by Lew Grade’s company, which was distinctly American in the way it operated. Although produced over here, many of its shows were co-productions with the US networks and aimed at first-run syndication in the States.
Don’t forget too that networks in the States are far more willing to axe shows that don’t perform. You might think you’re heading for 22 episodes in your brilliant new production, but if a few weeks in it doesn’t pick up the ratings then that’s it. The BBC has often received praise for sticking with shows that didn’t pick up an immediate audience but which ultimately turned into a major success.
HBO is a great example. And it isn’t clear that a UK subscription model would work: is the market big enough to support it?
A lot of attention can be turned to the ITV companies who missed multi-channel TV in the 80s and the Internet opportunities in the 90s because they were too busy enjoying their protected markets (of mass TV).
During that period they were uncreative through every strata of their businesses. That included investment in excellent programming.
When a full half of our TV industry choose to languish, the effects are felt throughout the ecosystem.
Anyone from the UK who’s interested in how the US system works in a bit more detail should read David Wild’s “The Showrunners”. Talks a lot about the brutality of the triumph-or-be-canned system they have over there. And no, it’s not just because they have writing teams.
Having read this, I guess in the US the rewards are so much higher if you can pull it off, it’s worth risking that much extra in the first place. Once you’ve got to the mythical 100 episodes and syndication, you’re made.
Perhaps in the UK we’re just more content with (or don’t have enough vision for) that sort of thinking…
Hmmm, more thoughts when it’s not the small hours after too much wine.
I dont agree that the 22 episode structure in the US is a significant point of difference, or at least good writer(s) can write great material within a given space regardless. I also know that we have the talent for this. Budget while very significant is not the main issue, the issue at its core is the half cock commisioning process that the industry is dogged by. The BBC is the main problem. Its public service remit means the the “ruthless” hunger the channels such as HBO posses isnt here. The BBC compromises the independant sector by stealing a lot of the best talent and then through its remit compromises what would in a commercial sector be do or die. Have a success or die trying. But coz its Auntie good talent gets detoothed and very rarely gets the space and pressure to flower. If the BBC got on with what id does best, serving the public interest then we would be kicking arse with the rest of the world rather than falling between two stalls as we currently are.
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