My favourite TV show of 2024 couldn’t be any more British if it tried. Set in a City investment bank violently buffeted by an omnishambolic treasury, soundtracked by wry, maudlin 1980s UK synthpop (Simple Minds, Pet Shop Boys) and featuring a character named Sir Henry Muck, Industry scans British society, from strip clubs and tabloids to private members’ establishments and country piles. Every second pulses with a lightly worn, razor-sharp fluency in British class and culture that can only be the product of a lifetime studying its dynamics. But the funny thing is, Industry isn’t really British at all.
Perhaps that’s a bit harsh. After all, Industry is – obviously – filmed here in the UK, has a predominantly British cast and is written by two Britons; erstwhile City boys Konrad Kay and Mickey Down. Yet this is a TV series that is essentially made by and for the US: Industry has two prominent American actors in its ensemble, premieres in the States and is funded by HBO, the network that almost single-handedly created prestige TV in the early 00s. The vibe may be British, but the money is not.
Industry’s transatlantic nature is not a one-off – in fact, it’s the new normal. The sheer number of TV shows that seem British due to their settings and casts yet are really US productions is quite frankly overwhelming. The past few months alone we’ve had Armando Iannucci’s UK-set superhero movie satire The Franchise (British writers plus a British-American cast); The Diplomat (a political thriller about the US ambassador to the UK); Say Nothing (a US-made drama about the Troubles) and The Agency (about a CIA spy in London).
Others from 2024 that fuse British and American elements include Prime Video’s The Decameron; the Kate Winslet-led The Regime; Greek myth-inspired Kaos; period dramas My Lady Jane and Bridgerton; and disability dramedy We Might Regret This. Thanks to their healthy American budgets, these shows tend to be polished and ambitious, but that aside, they have little in common: the transatlantic TV trope has extended its tendrils into all corners of comedy and drama. In fact, those examples are merely the tip of the iceberg. Over the past couple of years, it has become nigh-on impossible to make any scripted TV show in this country without American money. From modern British comedy (Everyone Else Burns, We Are Lady Parts) to modern classics (Top Boy) to actual classics (Doctor Who, now a co-production with Disney+), look closely at the credits and you’ll find that they have all been financed by the US.
“The big question is: have we been unwittingly colonised by American television?” says Phil Clarke. The one-time head of comedy for Channel 4, Clarke now runs the production company Various Artists Limited (VAL), which has made a raft of British shows – from I May Destroy You to Bafta-winning sitcom Such Brave Girls and Julia Davis’s Sally4Ever – with help from US production companies, streamers and networks. (The company’s co-founder, Jesse Armstrong, helmed another transatlantic treat in the form of Succession.)
If British comedy and drama has been annexed by the US, it hasn’t exactly been a hostile takeover. In the 11 years since Netflix released its first original series, House of Cards, the TV landscape in the country has changed dramatically: content from US streaming platforms (Amazon’s Prime Video, Disney+, Apple TV+, Paramount+) means UK viewers now expect a constant stream of slick, sophisticated and expensive television.
Homegrown TV is struggling to keep up in terms of quantity and quality: it’s no secret that publicly funded channels and those that rely on advertising revenue (ie the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5) are in various forms of financial crisis; Clarke says programme budgets haven’t risen in a decade while costs have ballooned thanks to inflation. Time was when TV channels doled out enough money to make the TV series they had commissioned. “Now you just can’t conceive of making something for a British broadcaster without getting money elsewhere,” says Roberto Troni, VAL’s joint MD. Who comes to the rescue? Usually, the Americans.
This might sound like a sinister development – and clearly, the fact that a cornerstone of British culture is now beholden to American tastes is not ideal – but let’s start with the positives. For Industry creators Down and Kay, this shift has been invigorating. The duo spent the 2010s attempting to break into TV in this country, which they viewed as increasingly stale and depressing: Down felt he’d “seen the same show 10 times every time I turned on the TV; everything was a grey [detective drama] procedural”, while Kay saw British television as “defanged, somehow dulled at the edges, unchallenging, basically unartistic”, This was partly because the TV industry was “a closed shop”, argues Down. The pair felt they couldn’t get a look in as both drama and comedy were dominated by a handful of established writers.
Yet HBO was open to their ideas: Kay and Down started working on Industry in 2017, when the network put it into development (the BBC came on board later as a co-producer and the first series was broadcast on both in 2020). Do they think the show would have ever been commissioned independently by a British broadcaster? “Absolutely not,” says Kay, considering it was “written by two guys nobody’s ever heard of, with no existing IP [intellectual property], no story-of-the-week element,” and was “too rarefied and esoteric”, according to Down. In other words, it would have been far too risky (and, you can’t help but feel, exciting) a proposition for the BBC or another British broadcaster. For HBO, however, it was a calculated punt based on its confidence in its ability to nurture promising talent – and the fact its subscription-based model meant it could afford a lengthy development process.
Still, why do American broadcasters bother taking risks across the Atlantic when they could do it on home turf? The truth is that despite a post-streaming glow-up, making TV in this country is still a much less expensive proposition than in the US. “We definitely used to be really cheap – and we are still relatively cheap compared with the States,” says Clarke. That’s down to the tax breaks that make the UK a famously popular place to film (it has been forecast that the UK may soon overtake LA in terms of studio space), plus the fact we are used to making shows on a shoestring. “Sometimes we talk to our American agents and they can’t believe the tiny budgets we make our shows on,” says Clarke, who maintains that British TV remains a “cottage industry” where writers work in their bedrooms, rather than a swish corporate world.
Throwing relatively small amounts of money at British productions and creatives means that if a show does hit – such as Scottish comic Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer, now one of the most-watched Netflix shows of all time – you’ve struck gold, and the increasingly broad appetites of US audiences (partly a result of the plethora of international content available to them on streamers) makes that more likely than ever before.
Yet TV programmes don’t need to rake in viewing figures to prove a clever investment: a zeitgeist-defining cult hit like Succession can provide a broadcaster with cultural capital or reinforce its identity and brand, says Troni. Dhanny Joshi is the producer of the sitcom Dreaming Whilst Black, which follows a wannabe film-maker in London; after the show was commissioned by the BBC, he needed to source extra funding. He found a partner in hip US tastemakers A24 – known for zeitgeisty films such as Uncut Gems and Everything Everywhere All At Once (as well as the shows Euphoria and The Curse – which felt the show “aligned with their vision, because they’ve got a brand they’ve honed really well”, he says. (A24 also co-produced VAL’s Such Brave Girls and Shane Meadows’ period drama The Gallows Pole, and are partners on Michaela Coel’s upcoming new series). Dreaming Whilst Black wasn’t a ratings smash, but it was a critical hit – crowned the second best TV moment of 2023 by Deadline – and a financial success, earning £4.3m in international sales.
Clearly, this isn’t just about cheap gambles: British talent is valued highly across the pond. Performance-wise, we have a reputation for professionalism – the popularity of British actors in Hollywood, a continuing source of consternation in the US, is largely thought to be down to the superior training offered in this country. When it comes to writing, however, our cottage industry approach is the draw. In 2015, then-HBO chief Michael Lombardo told the Royal Television Society that he found UK scripts more “voice-driven” and appealingly handcrafted due to our lack of writing rooms.
Yet this appreciation is resulting in brain drain. Clarke complains that US broadcasters “suck up all the top British writers. Often a conversation we have is: how long is so-and-so going to stay around making shows in Britain before they go and attempt it across the water?” It’s true: Richard Gadd now has a first-look agreement with Netflix; Kay and Down recently signed a three-year exclusive deal with HBO and Phoebe Waller-Bridge has had an Amazon deal – worth eight figures annually – since 2019.
That’s what’s in it for the Americans. But what’s the upshot for us? Industry may suggest US money has given British TV a kick up the arse (not ass), yet it has also booted it to face a slightly different direction. Industry was designed with US audiences in mind; the show’s “fish-out-of-water” US protagonist, chancer-genius Harper Stern, came from a desire “to ground an American viewer in the UK-ness of the overall experience”, says Kay.
It would be naive to think UK creators of US-funded shows get total free rein: Russell T Davies has confirmed that he has taken at least some of Disney’s notes about the new Doctor Who on board, while Kay and Down say they were encouraged to include some “over-explanation of British politics or media stuff” for Industry season three. Clarke recalls making a show for a streamer who asked if “somebody in the cast could speak more slowly for people in Los Angeles” due to their accent.
Transatlantic TV often means British television made for the benefit of American audiences – or, at the very least, American executives. In this case, Britishness becomes a fun theme, a point of difference, an interesting flavour. In Industry, the strange customs of society’s upper echelons are a mystery to be decoded. “You want to present something that feels like a little bit of a black box for an American viewer so they can get pleasure out of uncovering [meaning],” says Down. “I think some people really like the idea that it’s a slightly esoteric class analysis of a country they don’t live in.” Disney’s decision to fund the recent adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals may have been motivated by a similar logic (like The Diplomat and Industry, the show also features a fish-out-of-water American).
Industry’s hyper-real depiction of British life is thrilling and clever rather than cartoonish and ersatz. Yet this idea of trussing up British society for US audiences to goggle at isn’t always so edifying. Other shows take Britain and use it as a fantastical backdrop; a place of scenic olde worlde charm, odd behaviour and a lifestyle that is close to but tantalisingly different to the viewer’s own. Bridgerton, for example, gilds regency England with soapy plots and blatant anachronisms to sell a modern American fantasy of British history.
Meanwhile, Ted Lasso – a 13-time Emmy-winning show about a Kansas college football coach recruited to manage a fictional Premier League side – is set in the chocolate-box London suburb of Richmond, and makes hay from the culture clash between the rude, repressed British characters and the optimistic, open-hearted Lasso. Ted is an outsider, but US viewers are clearly the show’s central concern: the first episode alone features British characters using the terms “garbage” and “tie” (to mean draw). This uncanny cultural mashup can also be found in Netflix’s Sex Education, which sees British students wearing varsity jackets and playing American football, something its star Gillian Anderson has claimed was supposed to help it appeal to US audiences.
Ted Lasso has massively boosted the careers of its British cast members – but it’s almost as if their job is to cosplay Britishness for American eyes (the model is even being copied by Amazon, who in 2022 ordered All Stars, a Reese Witherspoon comedy about a cheerleading coach who attempts to introduce the sport to the UK). But even when the TV shows in question don’t pander, their very existence is still partly determined by the preferences of US audiences. Historically, British comedy was seen as a trendily left-field in the US; this stereotype means US broadcasters often prefer cutting-edge shows. “It’s perhaps easier to sell a British comedy if it’s considered cool in America as there’ll be a cult audience for it,” says Clarke, citing the outrageously dark 2023 sitcom Such Brave Girls as an example.
That’s all well and good – but what about more mainstream fare? Increasingly, it’s not getting made. “It definitely feels like there’s a slight prescription from America,” says VAL’s head of comedy, Jack Bayles. “And I do wonder if that means that culturally we’re lacking the stuff that is purely for us, in the way that Only Fools and Horses or Gavin & Stacey was.”
Despite his positive experiences working with HBO and other US companies, Clarke views this dilemma as something of an existential crisis for UK television. “British comedy, and I suspect drama as well, needs a Britpop moment where we say: hang on a sec, how do we just go back to making shows about Britain for British audiences?” Considering the perilous financial outlook for our major channels, it’s hard to see British TV ever existing independently again. For Clarke, however, it’s “a challenge that I’m determined that we solve, because therein lies the future”.
