Why are all European TV shows just detective stories about murder in a small village? And the reviews are always: "Much better than the rubbish Hollywood makes. The British know how to make good shows that don't spoonfeed the audience."
Like you live in Europe. Your entire continent has a bunch of castles and old ass buildings. You'd think they'd make more historical shows. Or shows about art. Or cooking. Or literally anything other than "totally not Prude & Prejudice" or "Sherlock Holmes, but Norwegian."
One of the best shows of all time is Utopia and it's completely batshit with gorgeous cinematography. Why aren't there more British shows like that? 🤔
Nah dude I want to watch a show about how a small time local land developer runs a satan worshipping sex cult with the mayor and starts abducting the teenage daughters of councilmembers who oppose their hotel development plans.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
The revolutionary idea of "Make good shows instead".
Detective shows are cheap to make, sell well and have good viewer numbers. Same reason that we are getting the 45th season of "Sheldon is autistic, what a jape".
Ye I'm being facetious. Police procedurals are cheap in the US too, which is why Law and Order is on season 57 or some shit and there's a CSI spin-off for every city.
These are relatively cheap to produce as TV goes and the BBC is really stingy with its money outside of the big, popular stuff like Dr Who. Same reason there was a glut of BBC sitcoms for a while as well.
had the audacity to get mad at British TV for not producing prestige shows like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad (which had budgets of millions per episode) like 5 years after the Tories further slashed the budgets for fiction programmes lmao
Obviously not to say that throwing money at creative projects solves everything but it probably helps vary it up a bit.
Capitalism is unfortunately really shitty at making art. One issue is cost of living in places where films/TV are made. You can get by with a low budget and still have quality shows. It's then a problem of paying your grip or writers enough for them to afford the commute to set.
The Office (US) It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Battlestar Galactica, the original Dr. Who, and The Outer Limits were all made for dirt cheap. IASIP was done with almost zero dollars for its first season and The Office was under $500k for most of the early episodes.