Everybody hates an Anglophile. Or at least everybody should. By this I mean the kind of buttered-scone Anglophiles who have supported middlebrow imports like Ballykissangel and Masterpiece Theatre through pledge drive after pledge drive: those self-hating televisual Tories who cling to genteel dramas and dotty, dated comedies as a Union Jacked bulwark against American TV's tendency to be so crude, so commercial...so American.
This is no knock on our overseas cousins. Indeed, the people who should hate this type of Anglophile the most are the British. For with some exceptions (Absolutely Fabulous, The Young Ones), the original British shows that Americans have most dearly embraced have reinforced a safe, neutered image of Britons, all Anglo veneer, no Saxon bile. (Let's not count the decades-old Monty Python and Fawlty Towers, which, however brilliant, are as representative of today's Britain as a suet pudding.)
Someone, however, is doing something to counter this starchy BBC stereotype--the BBC. Through its American cable channel, BBC America, founded two years ago and now in about 12 million homes, the Beeb is recolonizing American tellies with a slate heavy on newer dramas and "Britcoms." These raw, rude, thoroughly unpolite shows open a window on a brand new England, from the gritty Bosnian-war drama Peacekeepers to the Lynchian small-town comic horrors of The League of Gentlemen.
The motivation behind the channel is not cultural rehabilitation but the chance to grab a piece of the lucrative American market. The BBC has long sold reruns to the likes of PBS and licensed programs for adaptations (All in the Family, for instance, was based on Till Death Us Do Part). "The BBC was very proud of its success on [American TV]," says Paul Lee, BBC America's chief operating officer. "But it had no equity stake." So the broadcaster--a public entity in Britain--negotiated an alliance with Discovery Communications, parent of Discovery and other channels, which helped launch and market the new network.
It would have been easy to fill 24 hours with proven favorites. "People told me, 'The only things you can do are what you've already made a success of,'" Lee says. "Mysteries, classic dramas, maybe the more conservative sitcoms from PBS." Instead BBC America opted to distinguish itself with shows "closer to the new Beetle than to the Jaguar: vibrant, contemporary, different." While the network is not yet rated by Nielsen, it's the edgier programming--running in blocks called Cool Britannia and the Britcom Zone--that has inspired a dedicated audience following and critical praise. But the channel also hedges its bets with BBC news and more traditional reruns like Dr. Who and, yes, Ballykissangel. "If you liked that kind of programming, now you can get a lot more of it," says Judith A. McHale, president and chief operating officer of Discovery Communications. (And the BBC will still sell shows to PBS and cable.)
Given American producers' continuing taste for adapting Brit hits like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (from ITV, not the BBC), you might think that watching BBC America is watching the future of domestic network television. But in the Pax Nike era of American cultural tyranny, is there still any difference between TV and telly?