[DanaC]

Oh, no, I adored Ripper Street. But what did the BBC do with Ripper Street? Cancelled after two series. Fortunately Amazon took it on and the bigger budget meant it was a much better show in the third series - and now they're making two more.

But - it's a few little gems in an otherwise fairly barren landscape right now. And when we do make a really cracking drama it tends to be very short run - Sherlock's awesome, but three episodes every 2-3 years is not enough. Utopia was fantastic - but it was cancelled after two series of six episodes.

I get into an American show and it's like it takes over my life for a few weeks while I immerse myself in 100+ episodes. Very few British drama or comedy series run to more than a handful of episodes a series - and those that do tend not to be that good - because they don't have the American writer's room culture to invigirate those longer series (there are a handful of exceptions to this - with Dr Who being the most obvious).

So, we end up with a few really awesome, quirky and creative shows that are highly compact. Great fun to watch but you can consume the entire product in a day.

Lot of great ideas - but not explored in anything like the scale or depth that American TV employs.

Nowadays, a lot of American drama is bringing all that creative quirk that comes from the creatrive freedom of cable tv and the auteur model (now spilling out into Network), but not limited to a total of 12 or 18 episodes across two or three years because that is also supported by a writer's room model and bigger budgets.






[eta] I should be clear that I'm not suggesting American TV is all Game of Thrones and True Detective - I know there is an awful lot of dross on the hundreds of available channels - but just looking at the good, original and well-made drama coming out of both the UK and the US - the balance has shifted noticeably over the past decade - and over the last three or four years drama production in the Uk seems to have fallen into a slump, to me.