Question of the week: are there too many Brits on US TV?

28 April 2010 Rob Buckley BFI events, US TV 8 Comments

Time was the only Brits you saw on US TV were there to play foreigners and villains. Soap operas were full of them to add a little bit of the exotic.

Now though, they’re all over the place. Just about every US TV show has at least one Brit in it, either with their natural accent or with a US accent; any US show set in the past and/or a foreign country requires even non-British actors to put on British accents, but predominantly hires Brits.

Why is this? Well, James Purefoy, who I saw at the BFI this Sunday, says it’s because British actors are lower maintenance and cheaper. "We’re called ‘white Mexicans’ in LA."

So today’s question(s) is this:

Is having so many British actors in US shows a good thing? Are we stealing American jobs? Or does our lack of ‘airs and graces’ and smaller pay cheques mean that shows that wouldn’t get made can go ahead and look better than they would otherwise? Or is that irrelevant and you just like seeing Brits in US shows?

As always, leave a comment with your answer or a link to your answer on your own blog.

Author

  • Rob Buckley

    I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.

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