(2 of 2)
Not always. The BBC film Sex 'n' Death, an acerbic, sharp if unsubtle send-up of shock TV recently shown on BBC America, owes not a little to the American Hollywood-spoof genre, from The Larry Sanders Show to Action and back to the movie Network. And some Britcoms, like the wacky-priests' caper Father Ted, prove the Brits can make implausible, laugh-track-saturated work just as well as we, but with poorer production values. The best of the offerings, though, are not just rougher and often saltier than U.S. broadcast-network standards permit; they're genuinely surprising.
The most ingenious is The League of Gentlemen, a genre-defying black comedy that combines the sketch humor of Python with the small-town horror of Twin Peaks. Set in the fictional English hamlet Royston Vasey, it intertwines the stories of more than 60 characters, male and female--all played by three men--from the abusive counselor at the town unemployment center ("I know they've put monkeys in space, but do you really think they'll have one driving a fire engine?") to the reactionary proprietor couple of a local shop (named the Local Shop), who plot to stop a planned road that would expose Royston Vasey to change ("We don't even give change!"). Unlike traditional sketch comedies, League richly develops its characters and wrings out uncomfortable laughs from scenes that can veer close to drama. "We find these moments as funny as the gags," says writer Jeremy Dyson. "They're like the things in Glengarry Glen Ross that you find yourself laughing at because they're so awful." (BBC America is currently running the second season; for latecomers, Comedy Central starts carrying the series from the beginning on June 19.)
On the court-show spoof All Rise for Julian Clary, Clary--a proudly queeny gay man in dandyish paisleys and an ascot--dispenses arch, arbitrary justice to aggrieved parties: it's like the Judge Oscar Wilde Show. And Goodness Gracious Me offers postcolonialist sketch comedy from a British-Indian troupe.
The channel's biggest splash, though, may be Gormenghast, a four-part, $10 million adaptation of Mervyn Peake's lyrical fantasy trilogy (Saturdays, various times, beginning June 10). The lavish mini-series follows Steerpike (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a charismatic kitchen boy who insinuates and murders his way to power within the tired, decaying House of Groan. Unlike many American fantasy minis, it's neither a ponderous classics lesson nor a sugarcoated trifle, but a grotesquely funny, vulgar and penetrating tale of class and demagogy with pointed meaning for Britons. "In Gormenghast, you have this rusty royal family--well, I don't need to say more about that, do I?" says producer Estelle Daniel.
But like all good metaphors, Gormenghast's works on other levels. To the tired bloodline of PBS-endorsed British programming, BBC America's appealing, often lacerating new-wave series are a Steerpike-like intruder. And for the delicate, powdered neck of proper Anglophile telly, the long knives are out.