Category: tv

I’ve been thinking about the success of US imports on British TV a lot recently and various other bloggers have given me food for thought.

Clair mentions the derivative nature of some of C4’s new programming, while Andrew Collins recently bemoaned the pitiful figures that Curb Your Enthusiasm got for the first episode of its new series.

Hell, even I’ve moaned about all the US shows on our TV screens in the past fortnight.

What I’ve started wondering, though, is if it’s actually worth paying big money for some of these fantastically successful shows.

Series 4 of Lost premiered on Sky One at the weekend with an audience of 1.1 million – a good showing for a non-terrestrial channel, but still some way short of the likes of EastEnders, Emmerdale and Coronation Street.

The likes of CSI and its spin-offs do well for Five, but don’t pull in the same numbers that The Bill or Holby Blue manages, similarly the current series of Mistresses is getting more viewers than Sex & The City ever did.

Even Heroes for all its puff and hype looks puny in comparison to Doctor Who, and ER, even in its heyday, never came close to toppling Casualty.

Comedies fare no better. Larry Sanders and Seinfeld may be some of the most influential comedies ever, but Ricky Gervais has achieved far high ratings with both The Office and Extras.

Sure, some of these programmes were shunted into terrible time-slots (Larry Sanders and Seinfeld being two obvious examples), but even if they’d gone head-to-head, I doubt they’d have won the battle.

It seems that most channels are far too keen to spend their budgets on US ‘hits’, rather than invest in original homegrown programming, even if the ratings don’t necessarily do that well.

Don’t get me wrong, I love watching a lot of US imports – in fact, they make up more than 70% of my Sky+ viewing.

And do you know why? Because for every Harry Hill, Mistresses or Torchwood (three shows I’m watching currently), there are at least twice the number of US shows that are its equal being shown.

Let’s hope UK homegrown comedy and drama doesn’t disappear because TV execs can’t find the money, or indeed are too scared to commission it.

The rather good Andrew Collins wrote recently about the shockingly low viewing figures of the first episode of the new series of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

One of the things that came out of the post was the generally-accepted view that it was impossible to keep up with all the TV shows that are shown, simply because of the number of channels that now exist.

Ignoring the five terrestrial channels, there’s a case for keeping up with ITV2, BBC3, BBC4 and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

I had a bit of a UKTV Food addiction for a while, before I realised that once you’ve watched all the episodes of old series of Rick Stein, Nigella and Jamie, it starts to get a bit thin on the ground.

US imports, though, are even more difficult to keep up with, though. Last year alone we had Dexter and The Wire on FX, Heroes and Medium on Sci-Fi, Prison Break now on Sky One, the thoroughly underrated Dirt on Five US, along with Numb3rs, not forgetting the likes of The Sopranos, Studio 60 and Curb on E4 and Greys Anatomy on Living TV.

That’s 6 channels before we take into account the ones I mentioned earlier. Then, just occasionally, another minor channel will nab a programme before anyone else. Hallmark, for example, broadcast the first series of House, before Five took it off their hands.

Given that most people only watch 10 channels at the most, this makes it pretty tough to be a serious TV watcher.

When I was a kid, we used to laugh at the proliferation (although we probably never used that word) of TV channels that existed in America and couldn’t understand how anyone could need that many stations.

I’m still not advocating we need that many, but you soon realise how we got there!