British television has long struggled to compete with the vast, moneyed productions of its US competitors. But this Sunday at the Emmys – the prestigious US TV awards – there will be a British contender in every main category.
The John le Carré adaptation The Night Manager, Luther, Sherlock, War and Peace, Downton Abbey and Catastrophe have all put British drama on the US TV map over the past year, and have been rewarded with a string of nominations.
It will be a particularly important night for the BBC, which picked up 22 nominations across four critically acclaimed dramas that have been broadcast in the US. The Night Manager, Luther, Sherlock and War and Peace have all been triumphs for the corporation and validated their large production budgets. After it lost its most popular show, The Great British Bake Off, to Channel 4 this week, Emmys success would provide the BBC with a much-needed boost.
Tom Hiddleston, Idris Elba and Benedict Cumberbatch are all up for best actor, and both Hugh Laurie and Olivia Coleman were nominated for their roles in The Night Manager. The Channel 4 comedy Catastrophe is nominated in the writing category and ITV’s Downton Abbey, beloved by Americans, was granted a last hurrah for its final season with 10 nominations.
Simon Cornwell, producer of The Night Manager, said that reaching a global audience had been a constant consideration while making the show, and that it was reflective of the more ambitious climate that had recently gripped British drama commissioning.
“I think there was a time a few years ago where US TV was some way ahead of most UK drama in terms of creative ambition as well as scale,” said Cornwell. “But I think now you are very much seeing a renaissance in British drama. Generally, there is huge international demand for very high quality television and in the UK we are very well placed to step up and compete.”
The Night Manager was a co-production between the BBC and the US channel AMC, which enabled the show to be made with a much larger budget than BBC dramas would usually enjoy. Cornwell said there was much more of an appetite for such collaborations, which enabled British commissioners to be increasingly more ambitious with the scale of original drama.
The British domination of this year’s Emmy lists follows on from last year when the BBC’s The Honourable Woman and its adaptation of Wolf Hall picked up numerous Emmy nominations. They, too, starred big-name actors recognisable to US audiences, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Damian Lewis, and their success on both sides of the Atlantic paved the way for the BBC and other British broadcasters to continue to invest in original drama over the past year.
Ben Preston, editor of the Radio Times, said while British television had always been able to compete with the US in terms of writing and directing, its recent ability to drew in A-list talent was a key factor in British TV’s “drama renaissance”.
“It shows we absolutely can compete, and are competing, really well. We’ve always known that our TV industry has got fantastic craft skills – sharp scripted, beautifully shot, beautifully costumed programmes – but what Luther, Sherlock and The Night Manager have is star power, too. So for an American eye, it’s putting Hollywood names with British television and that takes it to a new level. And that shows what a force we are.”
“The Night Manager, Luther and Sherlock bring a slightly different perspective to drama than Americans are used to,” Preston said. “They are beyond the familiar, which gives them a cutting edge, makes them intriguing and is why American audiences are enjoying them so much.”
Jen Chaney, a TV columnist for the US magazine Vulture, said US interest in British drama had peaked in the past few years.
She said: “I do think more Americans are embracing and being exposed to British television, and I think there are two reasons why: the increase in accessibility to such programmes and, to a lesser extent, the popularity of Downton Abbey.
“Downton Abbey was such a phenomenon that I do think it made some people start thinking about British television and eager to dive more deeply into it.”
Chaney said the calibre of talent in the nominated British shows spoke to a wider trend in television on both sides of the Atlantic, where television was no longer seen as a step down for actors. The presence of Hiddleston, Elba and Cumberbatch, she said, “catches the eyes of Emmy voters and makes them more likely to take notice”.
