My television consumption habits have changed a lot in the last five or so years. When I was on the road a lot, I hardly watched any TV at all because I was usually on stage and, by the time I'd wrapped up for the night, there wasn't much on. It should come as a surprise to no one that traveling with a VCR back in the day wasn't really an option.
When my life off the road became more domesticated, I started watching more and more. This would have been in the mid-'90s. Still, I'm sure that the number of hours a week I spent in front of the tube was a fraction of what the average American was doing. It was the early days of streaming that really sucked me in. The summer that my daughter turned 13, we binge-watched "Cheers" before anyone was calling it binge-watching.
It was the Morning Briefing that turned me into a nightly consumer of televised fare. The "Top O' the Briefing" is actually the last thing I write, and, somewhere along the way, I developed the habit of taking my laptop over to my comfy chair and turning on the television while I finished up. Fortunately for me, this was when streaming was really catching fire. Unfortunately for me, it's also when every American show felt that it needed a knee-jerk anti-Trump message that had nothing to do with the plot.
Enter the streaming service BritBox, which saved my television from having a brick thrown at it.
Seriously, I don't even have any bricks lying around, but I would have gone and gotten one had I not happened upon British television.
Our friends across the pond don't give a ptarmigan's tit (something I just made up because it sounded British) about American politics when making television shows and movies. In fact, in the years I've been watching I've heard precious little about British politics. It would seem that the goal of British television entertainment is to — GASP! — entertain. It's madness, I tell you.
One of my favorite things about some of the British television mainstays like "Midsomer Murders" and "Vera" is that each episode is feature film length. There's a lot to binge there.
Some of the BritBox and AcornTV shows that are done in Scotland and Wales are almost like watching foreign movies. I'm a huge Doctor Who fan and had never heard David Tennant's real accent until I watched "Broadchurch." It was the first time I ever had to turn on subtitles to watch a show where they were speaking English.
Perhaps the biggest difference between British and American television is that they don't care at all about whether the actors are camera-friendly. Brit TV shows are populated with people who look like they came from villages you'd be afraid to be caught in after dark. I've been to England, so I know that there are a lot of attractive people there; they just don't seem to go into acting in large numbers.
Contrast that with The CW Network here, where everyone looks like they were created by AI from an impossible gene pool. Don't get me wrong, I am a fan of watching stunning women on screen. Even the hottest actresses lose their appeal when they're repeating lines about how awesome Hillary Clinton is, though. It's like the anti-Viagra.
I've grown fond of BritBox and AcornTV because they are my television safe spaces. I don't worry about timing an episode to see when the first cringe political moment will pop up. The weather is always crappy in the United Kingdom, so they don't whine about climate change a lot. They're probably praying for global warming over there.
Stay strong, British television writers and producers, and remember that the people paying for your product don't care about your politics. You're the best.
I'm never going to want a cup of tea, though.
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