Metacommentary and Mythology

The chapter focuses on the comedy drama Episodes (2011–2018), made by the British production company Hat Trick for the BBC and Showtime. A British husband and wife duo of screenwriters work on a US network adaptation of their hit UK comedy show, which is “Americanized,” and they fight for their creative authority and their marriage. Episodes has a hybrid identity in terms of form, format, and genre, expressed in decisions including setting, casting, and performance style. Each of these can be read as a commentary on the similarities and differences between American and British television cultures, alongside the narrative’s thematization of cultural and national differences. Episodes talks about transatlantic television and self-consciously performs it, asking whether a program or a person can be transatlantic by making a joke of it. The chapter argues that Episodes is a metacommentary on deeply embedded myths about the TV of each nation.

Mainstream Trends and Masterpiece Traditions

The chapter explores the successful meeting of “mainstream trends” and “masterpiece traditions” in the commissioning and production of Downton Abbey (2010–2015), and the way in which this “postheritage drama” marks a significant transatlantic encounter between different broadcasting cultures and storytelling traditions. Drawing on recent research on the special relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States in television drama, the analysis first details how this period drama became a collaboration between the commercial UK broadcaster ITV and the American PBS station WGBH and its Masterpiece series. The chapter then investigates how the long-form narrative with soap opera elements was designed to tap into the UK tradition of heritage drama, while drawing on the speed and storytelling style of US television series. The chapter closes with a discussion of Downton Abbey’s production story in relation to the series’ remarkable popularity in the United Kingdom, the United States, and beyond.

Crossing over the Atlantic

This chapter explores a fan-created digital mashup, SuperWhoLock, which combines elements from the US TV series Supernatural and UK shows Doctor Who and Sherlock (the latter two being linked, at the time, by a shared showrunner, Steven Moffat). It explores SuperWhoLock’s distinctive “transfandom” as a resolutely transcultural practice especially linked to sites such as Twitter and Tumblr. This fan-created crossover “show” conveys a fantastical Anglophilia for some transcultural fans, as well as multiple differences being posited between the “official” US/UK TV texts by fans, with some of these distinctions focusing on “heritage” rather than national meanings. The chapter concludes by looking at sentiment analysis via social media, using the Crimson Hexagon analytics engine, as well as considering one specific connecting word, “vanished.” Although SuperWhoLock’s time may now have passed, it remains indicative of digital fandom’s transcultural creativity, its relationship to remix culture, and its crossing of textual and national borders.

Contextualizing “Quality” US Television Programs for the United Kingdom

American programs have been a significant part of British television culture since the 1950s. Helping their mediation into British culture have been press critics who, in the past, have often been dismissive of such programs. However, as new forms of quality American programs have appeared, and online media have weakened the role of professional cultural intermediaries, a more supportive discourse has appeared. This chapter explores how contemporary American quality programs are being mediated into UK public debate. It will look at the website of one of the most important national UK newspapers, the Guardian, which has developed its online coverage of TV, often in ways more akin to fan sites, while encouraging public participation. The chapter will reflect on how the Guardian’s online strategy has served a niche UK readership interested in American programs, and how it has helped to reinforce and consecrate this group’s cultural dispositions in relation to US television.

Introduction

This work introduces the chapters (10–14) that analyze transatlantic television’s audiences and fans. It considers debates regarding transnational/transcultural TV distribution and consumption, highlighting issues such as binge watching and piracy. Following Joseph Straubhaar, it argues that the “cultural proximity” of US/UK audiences cannot be treated as objective and can in fact be modified by cultural capital. Such variations in transatlantic TV consumption suggest a need to break with “methodological nationalism,” and the piece concludes by engaging with recent work on transatlantic TV and audiences that has begun to do this, such as Elke Weissmann on TV crime shows. It then sets up each of the following fan/audience-focused chapters, ranging from Black Mirror fans on Reddit to “quality” US TV drama covered via the Guardian media blog, and then from British TV brands at San Diego Comic-Con to fanfiction’s engagement with national-cultural “nitpicking,” and the transcultural fan creation of SuperWhoLock.

Sherlock and Elementary

This chapter explores the emergence of two tiers of international television programs, high end and routine, and argues that the two types of content serve different functions in their import markets. The content’s cultural and temporal proximity to the import market determines the uses made of it by broadcasters as they attempt to appeal to their domestic audiences. But understanding these different functions requires complicating and nuancing the long-established concept of cultural proximity and developing the concept of temporal proximity. In the case studies, Sherlock and Elementary are used as exemplars of the high end and the routine. The first section establishes the distinction between high-end and routine drama; the second establishes the concept of the cultural proximity index; the third argues that Elementary is characterized by cultural accessibility; the fourth establishes the concept of the temporal proximity index in relation to high-end and routine television.

Introduction

The introduction begins by pointing to the common themes among the chapters in this part. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 explore the functions that the selected case study programs serve for specific broadcasting institutions (PBS, Sky, ITV, HBO, and the BBC) that choose to partner in one form or another with their transatlantic counterparts. These chapters also explore the themes of national identity, heritage and channel branding touched upon in the first part, highlighting their importance to the relationship of transatlantic partners and to specific programs’ placement within their import markets. Chapters 8 and 9 investigate the ways in which two programs, Episodes and Game of Thrones, textually encode some of the problematics of the transatlantic relationship—widespread assumptions about the differences between US/UK production contexts and acting styles. The rest of the introduction provides brief summaries of each chapter.

Branding Bridges

In 2011 the United Kingdom’s leading pay TV provider launched a new channel, Sky Atlantic. Central to the channel’s promotional appeal was the sourcing of “quality” American drama, primarily via a £150 million deal with HBO that secured exclusive rights to its past and future productions. Building on ideas of importation as a process of assimilation with the national market, this chapter considers how, for Sky Atlantic, interaction between transnational and national industrial spheres has not simply served as a means of acquiring content, but has itself formed a key brand narrative. Through close reading of promotional texts surrounding the channel’s launch, as well as industrial data and press reception, the chapter demonstrates that recent commercial and technological developments in British television are leading not to a dissolution of national borders, but to the intense monetization of control over the flows that take place across them.

Black Mirror as a Netflix Original

This chapter explores a “Netflix discourse” of fandom where it is claimed that Netflix can “unveil” fandom even when audiences do not self-identify as fans. This creates tensions between lived experiences of fandom and the data-driven targeting of multi-niche fan audiences. Rather than arguing that Netflix displaces national (US/UK) mainstreams, the chapter considers how national/transnational fan identities remain relationally in play. It focuses on Black Mirror as a case study, with this Channel 4 show having become a Netflix production from 2016 onward. The program’s creator, Charlie Brooker, mocked fears of “Americanization,” with the program’s fandom on Reddit following his lead and tending to read Netflix-produced seasons in terms of an “extended universe” rather than via US/UK-oriented meanings. However, fans have also carried out “coded” readings of “authentic” (British / Channel 4) Black Mirror by suggesting a “secret downer ending” to a Netflix episode that appeared to have an unusually happy ending.

BBC America

This chapter explores the corporate state of transatlantic television via a case study of BBC America, which is co-owned by the British BBC Worldwide and the American AMC Networks. The chapter details BBC America’s shift from an independent cable channel oriented around Britishness to an asset in AMC Networks’ portfolio, with a programming strategy more AMC than BBC. The study thereby illustrates that the value of a cable channel is no longer just in its individual brand; now its worth lies in the larger corporate network of program ownership and access to transnational platforms. BBC America’s prime-time scripted drama strategy is driven accordingly by the overarching goal to reach upscale, engaged viewers on both linear TV and video-on-demand platforms, in line with the global aspirations of its corporate parent.