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"I take your point, at least in the general case, but I think in the specific case you&#39;re missing the trees for the forest, so to speak. Yes, I absolutely agree that it&#39;s a massive fallacy to treat British television as if it&#39;s justified by the export market. In fact, my resistance to that line of thought is why I differ from a lot of people on Doctor Who in the 1980s - I reject the idea that its profitability based on overseas marketing was a reason to keep it in production given the purpose of the BBC.<br /><br />But I think your decision to only read the three shows you were familiar with led you astray. The section on Heil Honey I&#39;m Home is instructive regarding the context of the time. All of British television became more overtly commercial in the early 90s. And when you take a turn towards the overtly commercial it&#39;s difficult not to notice that there&#39;s a very large market in the United States that likes certain kinds of British television. This is a huge change in British television. A decade earlier the idea that Doctor Who should be made because people not in the UK liked it was explicitly rejected as a reason to keep it around. Come the 90s and the opposite logic would have held sway - Doctor Who was a profit center, so it should be exploited as much as possible. But by that time it was off the air and instead we got a decade long wrong turn of trying to flog Doctor Who out to various producers like it was just another sci-fi franchise in need of a reboot. <br /><br />I think the revealing fact is your observation that ITV mostly makes murder mysteries and period serials. Why wouldn&#39;t they when the two banners under which British material was routinely shown in the US were Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery!? Those are the two most export-friendly focuses imaginable.<br /><br />Now from an aesthetic standpoint I&#39;ll agree with you readily - very little good comes out of Americanizing British comedy. I&#39;d even say that making British comedy for the export market is a poor idea. Occasionally you get lucky, as with Jeeves and Wooster, but that&#39;s because Wodehouse is hard to screw up by doing a faithful adaptation. But that doesn&#39;t mean that it wasn&#39;t what was being done at the time. British television in the 90s was more export focused. &quot;We can sell it in America&quot; was a reason to make something, where it hadn&#39;t been before. There&#39;s some great stuff in 90s British television, but there&#39;s an absolute explosion of quality once the BBC gets its overtly commercial jollies out and starts acting like a public service again in the late 90s/early 00s."
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