William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition is a novel of collapse. As the line between true and false, digital and physical starts to crumble in protagonist Cayce’s quest to find the maker of the mysterious “footage,” so too does the boundary between local and global—especially that dividing the UK and America. It’s a phenomenon the narrator refers to as “the mirror world”: the fact that the two countries are inverted reflections of each other, somehow distinctly different and yet indistinguishable, all at the same time.
Watching British and American TV renders this uncanny contrast in stark terms. Living in the digital era helps, too. It’s remarkably easy to open up a browser and flip back and forth between the enormous influence to our south, and the other that looms across the ocean. And if it’s TV that best captures the currents and idiosyncrasies of everyday life, then hopping back and forth between the two sides of the Atlantic is an opportunity to glance at one’s own culture as-it-might-have-been, finding in the differences the possibilities for change.
This ran through my mind as I watched the awful first two or three episodes of the resurrected Arrested Development. It seems fair to say that were Arrested Development an English creation, season four simply wouldn’t exist. The relentless push to keep shows going is endemic to American TV, a kind of overcompensation for the trauma of aborted cult favourites like Firefly and Freaks and Geeks. One wonders what a show like Lost might have been like if not for the pressure to live up to the monetary demands of American entertainment.
But it is perhaps the stylistics of British TV that provide the biggest contrast. Most obvious is the hit Peep Show, which not only stars David Mitchell and Robert Webb—who are behind what is arguably the best sketch comedy show of recent years—but is also shot entirely from a first-person view. It’s discombobulating, but vital and new. It also has a thematic purpose: the show excels at the awful and awkward inner monologues of id-driven Jess and superego-plagued Mark as they navigate their thirties in a non-descript part of London, the simple honesty of their innermost thoughts becoming the stuff of comedy gold.
Such innovations in camerawork often seem to reflect a desire to push other boundaries. Tilt-shift and other novel effects are often employed, as in the excellent Fresh Meat, which upends many of the TV clichés about new university students living together to create a remarkably compelling, funny show. Just the first episode alone highlights much of what would rarely make it onto North American TV—for one, the intro set to MC5’s “Kick out the Jams,” but perhaps most notably when sweet-natured Josie has her first one-night stand. In order to defuse the tension in the morning, she jovially tells her conquest that “there is a breakfast offered as part of the service, but it’s continental; grab a Ryvita and fuck off.” It’s not just the refreshingly unapologetic female sexuality, either. It’s the way the series’ pacing and tone skirts around generic and formal conventions to somehow arrive at something that feels utterly and unapologetically modern. The highly self-reflexive nature of recent American television, with its relentlessly ironic takes on the past, just can’t match Fresh Meat’s eminently contemporary feel.
It would be both wrong and clichéd, however, to revert to hoary old notions that “British TV is just better.” In a decade that has seen The Wire, Mad Men, Community, and no end of smart, creative programming, arguing that American TV isn’t also excellent would be absurd. But it seems British TV is concerned with being brilliant in ways less obvious than David Simon’s dense Dickensianism or even Arrested Development’s capacity to return to a joke a full season later. Rather, it’s in the gleefully biting sarcasm of political satire such as The Thick of It or even the simple pleasures of the sitcom Friday Night Dinner—which brilliantly captures the strangeness of family dynamics at a weekly family dinner—that the cleverness of English wit is to be found.
But it isn’t just the belly-laughs and honest realism that underpin what makes British TV so interesting—it’s to what ends those tools are put. Take the sitcom Some Girls. Ostensibly aimed at teen girls, it situates itself in the poor council estates of London and is populated by a multicultural cast. More interesting, though, is how it tackles the tropes of female youth. When caustic Saz decides she needs to lose her virginity, she is desperate to appear funny to her crush, and wants to learn some jokes. Unpredictable, gregarious Holli offers the following knock-knock punchline as pick-up strategy: “Justin who? Just in time for you to get down and party with me, ’cause I’m a virgin and I want you to kick in my hymen!”
To watch a scene like that from a couch in Toronto is to be struck by the possibility of a culture that embraces reality as it is and makes humour out of it. America treats its television as an aspirational horizon. From reality TV to soaps to a prime-time lineup full of the impossibly attractive, entertainment in the US is almost always an ideal made to beckon you forward into something else, and it’s a vision that’s often improbable in its neat, tidy perfection. Television in the UK seems the inverse: this is the grit and silliness of life on a grey, suburban high street, but here we find hilarity and art.
In Gibson’s novel, the mirror-world was a critique of global monoculture as it was enabled by the web. But in an age in which it has become incredibly easy to jump back and forth between worlds of entertainment, as it turns out, the mirror doesn’t simply reflect sameness. It refracts, highlights differences, casts intriguing shadows, creating a challenging projection of how things might be. Rather than a great global mirror casting symmetrical reflections everywhere, it’s actually an opportunity to imagine the new.
