It used to be so easy to tell the difference between a British TV show and an American one. The British show would have a maximum of 12 episodes, and the American one would have several hundred, and run for about a decade and a half.
And this meant that they had to be viewed in a different way. These long American shows – think Grey’s Anatomy or NCIS or even 24 – had a habit of rattling on for so long that quality control became much less important than simply keeping the train on the rails. To think of a show like this is to think of a show that burst out of the gates with a ton of promise, then dwindled on to fewer plaudits and smaller audiences until the network did the decent thing and cancelled them. It is roughly the television equivalent of wanting to split up with someone but, rather than simply dumping them, just deciding to grow more neglectfully distant until they can’t take it and break up with you.
