British TV is doing _great_ in the streaming era: black mirror, adolescence, peaky blinders, the crown, call the midwife, derry girls, downtown abbey; and so many great police procedurals: line of duty, endeavour, the bay, Sherlock, grace; even those Harlan coben miniserieses - the ones with at least one absurd plot twist per episode - are great fun!
While I’ll be among the first to moan that we’ll never see another red dwarf, python, tinker tailor/smiley’s people, yes minister, father ted [0] .. British tv is still producing great stuff.
It’s the “bureaucrats” in the bbc who are under threat from streaming. I’m not losing sleep!
[0] made in Britain; simply could not have been made in Ireland as was.
you're nitpicking. it's a high class, well-produced, well-acted, British-made TV show, by the BBC, of a very high quality that would be well-regarded in any era (if you ignore the weird racial thing they did in S2)
>Line of Duty
your opinion is absolutely in the minority, which isn't to say it's wrong, but it's a very well regarded, high class show that's widely seen as well above "decent procedural"
>Adolescence
whether it's liberal or paid for by Netflix is irrelevant to whether it's a high quality British-made tv show
>you haven't watched the others
then you're going to struggle to give a useful opinion on this matter, aren't you?
>Hardly in the class of historical Beeb
every historical BBC show you can name will have myriad minor subjective criticisms of the like you've just produced
>let alone contemporary US brilliance.
if you think US TV is even remotely comparable with UK TV, you're not paying attention. the US is long since out of its golden era, which pretty much died with Game of Thrones. US media has an order of magnitude more financial means than that of the UK, and yet what have they created of any real quality in the last few years besides White Lotus? they repeatedly fail to even remotely approach the class and quality of our TV. on the rare occasions they do get close, it's on the back of British actors or British production
this kind of take is usually the preserve of nostalgic old men who've just discovered YouTube comments, so I'm surprised to see it rephrased so many times here. if you aren't finding high quality modern British-made TV shows it's because you're not looking or you're unwilling to try new things. Wolf Hall, Line of Duty, Slow Horses, Rivals, Fleabag, Adolescence, Inside no 9, Veep, etc etc etc etc. I could name 10 more. TV is more stratified and yes there are a lot of worthless filler game shows and talk shows, but just as it was in the 70s and 80s, there are plenty of stand-out shows that will last the test of time
Depends on the country, it is totally ok for some british detective/crime series to have 6 episode seasons, because each episode is an hour or 1,5 long, they are not filled with pointless stuff to make them longer, etc.
Not to get too off topic, but can you name perhaps a "top 5" of shows/movies available on BBC iPlayer right now? What I've been recommended there has always been top notch, but it's hard (for me!) to find the gems just trying to browse through what's on offer. Thanks!
(Line of Duty is a show that was recommended to me that I liked quite a bit. I'm trying to remember the couple of others, but coming up blank...)
I absolutely adore Line of Duty. I like how everyone in the team of protagonists is not entirely clean, though not estirely bad either.
Of course the prime example and my favorite cop TV show ever is The Shield. You are rooting for the bad guys, though you gradually realize just how bad they are as the series progresses, and eventually you become horrified and want their punishment to finally arrive... but still, every time they evade it you (I) find myself cheering. Horrifying.
The 'police procedural' crime drama has become very popular on British TV in recent years. There's probably too of much it to be honest.
The most popular is a BBC series called Line of Duty about corruption in the police force ("bent coppers"). There are seven series (seasons) so far and the plots are far-fetched but entertaining. Every episode features police interviews or interrogations which make up much of the drama.
Interesting to read someone else's insights and to find so many of them resonate.
One point that I don't think has been touched on is manipulating the plot for non-storytelling grounds, which usually happens as they are nearing the end of a season and/or they're leaving it open for a sequel (season or film).
This creates a real lack of resolution now. In the era of serious films, they could occasionally leave unresolved turns at the end of a film on purpose ("life isn't neat") but it was usually done with the eloquence of an accomplished director.
Now it's so mercenary that it is really starting to detract. Add to this that many series use guest directors who seem to wander off on a personal mission, and it's a recipe for the sort of mess we've seen in so many big budgets series.
Whilst I liked aspects of the final season, Game of Thrones didn't tie up even a fraction of the main plots let alone the sub plots. In the UK there were similar split opinions on Line of Duty. You can only take so much of your audiences time and squander it before people lose trust. A clear ending shouldn't be that hard to write.
My wife watched a few seasons of "Line of Duty", a British production. The first episodes of at least two seasons had persons with automatic rifles ambushing police convoys. This may happen from time to time in Sinaloa, but in England?
From my point of view the problem manifests in this way: I simply don't bother to invest the time to watch new shows until it's clear that they're going to get a proper run that allows them to finish well (Breaking Bad, Justified; even Sons of Anarchy, which was a real slog for the last 3 seasons, ended well).
I'm tired of investing time in shows that Netflix simply drops: The Expanse (though now thankfully picked up by Amazon), Designated Survivor, and Shooter (although that was total crap, especially after season 1) spring immediately to mind, but there have been plenty of others.
I also won't bother starting to watch shows that I know Netflix have cancelled before they've concluded (e.g., Glow), because what's the point? And this is starting to severely erode the value of Netflix's library to me.
Things that have worked incredibly well on Netflix are shows that tell self-contained stories within a single season, like Narcos or Fargo, or shows that tell have a self contained but are able to tell it in a longer form than feature film would allow. The canonical example of the latter for me is Godless, which is one of the best shows on TV, I think. Genuinely fantastic.
And this last point leads on to another, which others have made: US TV series are too long, typically 18 - 24 episodes per season, multiple seasons, often too bloated with filler episodes, and often suffer from ridiculous over-plotting after the first few seasons, which comes off as aimless thrashing around: Prison Break (season 3 onwards: just utter nonsense), 24 (SPOILER ALERT: I mean, seriously, WTF was that Tony Almeida betrayal storyline all about in, I think, the final season - multiple sharks were jumped and I'm still pissed off about it).
On the flipside UK TV series are often too short: 6 half-hour episodes is still quite typical, so you're only really getting into a show and then suddenly the season ends. With that said, for some shows this has been made to work really well: Line of Duty, or the earlier seasons of Luther.
I do feel like, for many shows, a happy medium would be 10 - 12 hour long episodes. You could then afford to make a much more polished product, whilst still probably investing quite a bit less.
I find the British model of 6-8 episode series, with a low possibility of renewal, leads to much better TV in my opinion. If you have to produce 20+ episodes of a series then your core story ends up being dragged out in 5 minute doses across all those episodes, and you inevitably end up with slow episodes where nothing much happens.
Compare for example Line of Duty with The Shield. Both on the surface dramas about corrupt police officers, but Line of Duty is relentless in its plot development - there’s barely a sentence that doesn’t lead somewhere, whereas The Shield has whole episodes with nothing much of consequence.
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British TV is doing _great_ in the streaming era: black mirror, adolescence, peaky blinders, the crown, call the midwife, derry girls, downtown abbey; and so many great police procedurals: line of duty, endeavour, the bay, Sherlock, grace; even those Harlan coben miniserieses - the ones with at least one absurd plot twist per episode - are great fun!
While I’ll be among the first to moan that we’ll never see another red dwarf, python, tinker tailor/smiley’s people, yes minister, father ted [0] .. British tv is still producing great stuff.
It’s the “bureaucrats” in the bbc who are under threat from streaming. I’m not losing sleep!
[0] made in Britain; simply could not have been made in Ireland as was.
>Wolf Hall ...
you're nitpicking. it's a high class, well-produced, well-acted, British-made TV show, by the BBC, of a very high quality that would be well-regarded in any era (if you ignore the weird racial thing they did in S2)
>Line of Duty
your opinion is absolutely in the minority, which isn't to say it's wrong, but it's a very well regarded, high class show that's widely seen as well above "decent procedural"
>Adolescence
whether it's liberal or paid for by Netflix is irrelevant to whether it's a high quality British-made tv show
>you haven't watched the others
then you're going to struggle to give a useful opinion on this matter, aren't you?
>Hardly in the class of historical Beeb
every historical BBC show you can name will have myriad minor subjective criticisms of the like you've just produced
>let alone contemporary US brilliance.
if you think US TV is even remotely comparable with UK TV, you're not paying attention. the US is long since out of its golden era, which pretty much died with Game of Thrones. US media has an order of magnitude more financial means than that of the UK, and yet what have they created of any real quality in the last few years besides White Lotus? they repeatedly fail to even remotely approach the class and quality of our TV. on the rare occasions they do get close, it's on the back of British actors or British production
this kind of take is usually the preserve of nostalgic old men who've just discovered YouTube comments, so I'm surprised to see it rephrased so many times here. if you aren't finding high quality modern British-made TV shows it's because you're not looking or you're unwilling to try new things. Wolf Hall, Line of Duty, Slow Horses, Rivals, Fleabag, Adolescence, Inside no 9, Veep, etc etc etc etc. I could name 10 more. TV is more stratified and yes there are a lot of worthless filler game shows and talk shows, but just as it was in the 70s and 80s, there are plenty of stand-out shows that will last the test of time
Depends on the country, it is totally ok for some british detective/crime series to have 6 episode seasons, because each episode is an hour or 1,5 long, they are not filled with pointless stuff to make them longer, etc.
I recommend Line of duty.
Not to get too off topic, but can you name perhaps a "top 5" of shows/movies available on BBC iPlayer right now? What I've been recommended there has always been top notch, but it's hard (for me!) to find the gems just trying to browse through what's on offer. Thanks!
(Line of Duty is a show that was recommended to me that I liked quite a bit. I'm trying to remember the couple of others, but coming up blank...)
I absolutely adore Line of Duty. I like how everyone in the team of protagonists is not entirely clean, though not estirely bad either.
Of course the prime example and my favorite cop TV show ever is The Shield. You are rooting for the bad guys, though you gradually realize just how bad they are as the series progresses, and eventually you become horrified and want their punishment to finally arrive... but still, every time they evade it you (I) find myself cheering. Horrifying.
The 'police procedural' crime drama has become very popular on British TV in recent years. There's probably too of much it to be honest.
The most popular is a BBC series called Line of Duty about corruption in the police force ("bent coppers"). There are seven series (seasons) so far and the plots are far-fetched but entertaining. Every episode features police interviews or interrogations which make up much of the drama.
Interesting to read someone else's insights and to find so many of them resonate.
One point that I don't think has been touched on is manipulating the plot for non-storytelling grounds, which usually happens as they are nearing the end of a season and/or they're leaving it open for a sequel (season or film).
This creates a real lack of resolution now. In the era of serious films, they could occasionally leave unresolved turns at the end of a film on purpose ("life isn't neat") but it was usually done with the eloquence of an accomplished director.
Now it's so mercenary that it is really starting to detract. Add to this that many series use guest directors who seem to wander off on a personal mission, and it's a recipe for the sort of mess we've seen in so many big budgets series.
Whilst I liked aspects of the final season, Game of Thrones didn't tie up even a fraction of the main plots let alone the sub plots. In the UK there were similar split opinions on Line of Duty. You can only take so much of your audiences time and squander it before people lose trust. A clear ending shouldn't be that hard to write.
My wife watched a few seasons of "Line of Duty", a British production. The first episodes of at least two seasons had persons with automatic rifles ambushing police convoys. This may happen from time to time in Sinaloa, but in England?
From my point of view the problem manifests in this way: I simply don't bother to invest the time to watch new shows until it's clear that they're going to get a proper run that allows them to finish well (Breaking Bad, Justified; even Sons of Anarchy, which was a real slog for the last 3 seasons, ended well).
I'm tired of investing time in shows that Netflix simply drops: The Expanse (though now thankfully picked up by Amazon), Designated Survivor, and Shooter (although that was total crap, especially after season 1) spring immediately to mind, but there have been plenty of others.
I also won't bother starting to watch shows that I know Netflix have cancelled before they've concluded (e.g., Glow), because what's the point? And this is starting to severely erode the value of Netflix's library to me.
Things that have worked incredibly well on Netflix are shows that tell self-contained stories within a single season, like Narcos or Fargo, or shows that tell have a self contained but are able to tell it in a longer form than feature film would allow. The canonical example of the latter for me is Godless, which is one of the best shows on TV, I think. Genuinely fantastic.
And this last point leads on to another, which others have made: US TV series are too long, typically 18 - 24 episodes per season, multiple seasons, often too bloated with filler episodes, and often suffer from ridiculous over-plotting after the first few seasons, which comes off as aimless thrashing around: Prison Break (season 3 onwards: just utter nonsense), 24 (SPOILER ALERT: I mean, seriously, WTF was that Tony Almeida betrayal storyline all about in, I think, the final season - multiple sharks were jumped and I'm still pissed off about it).
On the flipside UK TV series are often too short: 6 half-hour episodes is still quite typical, so you're only really getting into a show and then suddenly the season ends. With that said, for some shows this has been made to work really well: Line of Duty, or the earlier seasons of Luther.
I do feel like, for many shows, a happy medium would be 10 - 12 hour long episodes. You could then afford to make a much more polished product, whilst still probably investing quite a bit less.
The title claim is untrue and trivially falsifiable, but I haven't seen any articles that have actually made an effort to verify it.
Here are screens from two recent movies where villainous characters use iPhones:
https://productplacementblog.com/movies/apple-iphone-smartphone-used-by-ben-mckenzie-in-line-of-duty-2019/
https://productplacementblog.com/movies/apple-iphone-4s-smartphone-in-hustlers-2019/
I find the British model of 6-8 episode series, with a low possibility of renewal, leads to much better TV in my opinion. If you have to produce 20+ episodes of a series then your core story ends up being dragged out in 5 minute doses across all those episodes, and you inevitably end up with slow episodes where nothing much happens.
Compare for example Line of Duty with The Shield. Both on the surface dramas about corrupt police officers, but Line of Duty is relentless in its plot development - there’s barely a sentence that doesn’t lead somewhere, whereas The Shield has whole episodes with nothing much of consequence.
You should scrape a bit and populate this for TV shows. Neither "Rick and Morty" nor "Line of Duty" were there.