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 