In a market as huge and diverse as The USA undoubtedly there is further room amongst the On air comedy arena for the quintessential British sitcom. It appears nevertheless that the big broadcasters favor the homegrown kind and the classic English sitcoms witness themselves as part of to the area’s PBS stations.
What causes this?
Reasonably, as one would anticipate in any free economy such as the North American Continent, commercial considerations have a role. More precisely, supply and demand. Let’s look a bit closer at these elements.
To begin with, on the market size side there are more or less 1.6M British ex patriots presently living in either America or Canada, add to this the indigenous wanting for ‘all things British’ and it rapidly becomes unmistakeable that there is meaningful amount of likely viewers that might be partial to tuning into high-quality old fashioned English comedy. Also there are many many Tv stations on the North American network with literally tens of thousands of hours of programming to be provided each and every week.
The issue then has to be on the supply side, correct? Loosely yes, it is not that there is a shortfall of English comedy readily available, rather there is a shortfall of English comedy in a way that is suited for North American television. This is a slightly distinctive situation that is created by the non-commercial nature of the British domestic broadcaster, the BBC.
There is no question that independent channels in United Kingdom such as ITV and Channel 4 are now showing some very fine ‘britcoms’ of the likes of ‘Mr Bean’ or ‘Black Books’ for example. The BBC comedy section however is and always has been the most prolific developer of classic English comedy and given its position as the national broadcaster of Great Britain it is paid for through viewers tv license fees thereby dispensing with the need for advertising breaks. This implies that a typical English comedy is taped for a full 30 minutes while the US and Canadian networks need less lengthy, 22 minute, productions to enable commercial breaks.
In addition a further ‘schedule integration’ problem occurs to dissuade North American stations from showing English comedies. A typical US TV sitcom will run in seasons that typically consist of twenty episodes, whereas a regular English comedy is typically filmed for only six episodes at a time.
While the US networks are not likely to change their broadcast plans anytime soon, the English comedy producers are beginning to realize the opportunities of the US and Canadian markets, all are now producing DVD box sets of most well known British sitcoms in Region 1 format (that’s US & Canada).
One last thing, if you would like to learn more about English Comedy, there is plenty more information on English Comedy here.