Thriller writer Peter Jukes has written an angry piece for Prospect about why British TV has lost its way so badly that it could never hope to produce a series like The Wire. It's familiar but still interesting stuff. The breakup of the old US network cartel and competition from cable channels such as HBO has been good for competition – the result is that shows have smartened up, rather than dumbed down. It's given us series such as Mad Men , The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and Sex and the City. In the UK, Channel 4 and ITV have largely backed out of adult drama, leaving the whole business in the hands of the BBC – and one man in particular, controller of drama commissioning Ben Stephenson.
It's not that Britain is short of TV writing talent, reckons Jukes, but that it hasn't worked out how to use it. As a result, the US has cornered the market in the high-end stuff that bears devoted watching and repeat viewing. Prospect has a graphic to demonstrate the point: one second-series episode of The Wire has 21 interweaving storylines; an episode of Life on Mars combines four. The only way to produce sophisticated, rich, long-running drama like The Wire or even ER is to use a team of writers who collaborate under a showrunner, a system the US studios has cracked. It's too much for even one great dramatist to write the whole thing, but you can't hire hack writers to work on episodes in isolation. Result: US viewers sit down to an evening of Damages; we get Casualty.
It's interesting that soaps are daytime fodder in America. In Britain, they clog the primetime slots – and former Holby City writer Jukes reserves most of his bile for them. He says writing for that show involved "the most dispiriting experiences in my 25 years as a dramatist. Soaps squeeze the creativity and innovation out of you". Sour grapes or has he hit the problem on the head?
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