British TV Shows You Should Be Watching

This lens is my guide to some of the best British tv shows currently airing on BBCAmerica, SciFi and HBO.  Most of the BBCAmerica schedule tends to be dedicated to gardening shows, cooking shows and reality programming like "Changing Rooms", but every once in awhile we get the good stuff.

All of these particular British shows are either currently in production and therefore you can expect additional seasons, or they've recently wrapped production. For the latter, they've only just started airing on BBCAmerica, so what's old hat for the UK is new to the US.

Not all of these shows are on the schedule all the time, but if you wait, eventually they'll turn up. Or you can just grab the DVDs for the ones that are available. 

*And SciFi (Doctor Who airs first on SciFi then BBCAmerica) 

Note for American viewers and British readers: Within Britain, tv series aren't generally referred to as having "seasons". Everything's just called a series, whether a particular series happens to continue year after year, or not. 

Quite frankly, I think the American habit of referring to a show as being a series and each year's worth of episodes being called a season makes more sense.  You can then tell whether a particular episode is a season finale (and can thus expect it to continue in future) or a series finale (the end, kaput!) when you see the info printed in your TV guide or on your DVR, so I'll be using the American vernacular here since this lens is primarily for viewers in the US.

Also, British series have much shorter seasons -- most of these shows run about 12-13 episodes per season, but some of them are as short as 6-8 episodes.  US network series run anywhere from 21 to 24 episodes each season. So watching British tv series bears more resemblance to watching series on HBO or Showtime.  The quality level also remains as high as the shows on our premium cable channels. It's difficult to maintain this kind of quality consistently if the writers have to pump out 23 episodes.

Additionally, with the exception of Doctor Who, even highly successful British tv shows tend to have much shorter runs than their American counterparts. Often series will only run for a couple of seasons.  The British television production philosophy appears to be "always leave them wanting more". This is highly different from the American production philosophy of "let's milk this sucker for all its worth".

Enjoy!