The End of the British 6-Pack?

Heh heh. I don't know why, but the idea of the "British 6-Pack" amuses me. Face it, we have to get a new joke -- the-making-fun-of-their-teeth thing went past the sell-by date years ago.

In this article at The Guardian website (yes, registration is required. but it's free, stop whining.) British TV Production Exec Jane Featherstone opines that the UK may finally have to move away from the six-pack... "We are going to have to start producing longer-running series," she says. "We are going to have to start the shift to US-style 26-part series..."

Here in Canada, of course, CBC is in love with the six-pack (cause, you know, that's what they do in the UK.) Featherstone's other point is that you have to make shows with broader appeal, that could sell overseas, even -- to make up the difference in budgets. That seems to be going in the opposite direction of CBC too, but who knows, now that a British person has suggested something different, things could change awfully quick here, too...

I think longer seasons are definitely better for building and maintaining writing careers, because as it stands, the UK is a lot like Canada in the sense that short runs of episodes tend to mean they only employ the writers who've created the shows. That's not good for training, and it's not good for building a larger community of professional writers. (I believe the situation, believe it or not, is actually a little better in the UK, since there is some support there for professional theatre. In Canada...not so much.)

How can building a series of sets, crewing up, and starting a whole production for six episodes really be economical, anyway? Your advertising costs for promotion are still pretty fixed -- what, other than raising the budget, is the downside of producing 13? Or 18? Or 22? Or hell, even 8?

I hope it happens. If the UK recognizes that short run series aren't the most viable model, then maybe the anglophiles here will finally be forced to wake up and smell the international market -- and not in the bad-old-days way of crappy industrial action-adventure stuff designed to ape a U.S. syndie market that went south years ago.

Everyone in Canada talks about a U.S. sale, and then goes out and makes product that would never in a million years sell there because of how completely it reeks of provinciality. Note to creators: Corner Gas is universal. Slings & Arrows is universal. Within its niche, so is Trailer Park Boys. But Eleventh Hour (the Canadian show, not the UK version) and Hatching, Matching & Dispatching aint. You can be specific to a place, and still be universal. But it means you have to think about the audience, and stop being quite so self-indulgent.

That being said, there are plenty of people, professional people, who get it here in the former British North America...So, UK Producers -- if you're going to make a go of this 22 episode thing, and if you need a co-production partner to make up some of those budgets, may I humbly suggest Canada? We're like the U.S.'s slutty little sister who likes to smoke pot and drink strong beer and hang out with married gay boys and dykes while we take our aspirin with codeine. We don't have to watch hockey. We just like to. But we can get past that. And look -- that's Queen Liz on our money, too! Yayyy!

Featherstone's production company, Kudos, is probably best known on this side of the pond for A&E's MI-5 (which shows in Canada on BBC Canada under its original British Title, Spooks.) If you've only seen the show on A&E, I'd highly advise picking up the DVD's of Season One and Two (and soon, Three) as A&E cut out up to fifteen minutes per episode for commercials.



I always liked Spooks/MI-5. I thought it was a bracing and refreshing look inside the world of Intelligence -- again, with a non-Amero-centric spin to it. Plus, the sexy American CIA Babe they had on the show, was, well...hot.

The Guardian article has a lot to say about the show that's quite illuminating. And one bit that flew right over my cultural head, but is remarkably cool -- and shows just how pressure cooker the TV game can be.

One of the favorite moments that made me sit up and take notice in MI-5 early on was a gruesome scene where someone was tortured using a deep fryer. It was raw and surprising as hell. What I didn't realize is that, if you were watching in the UK, it played as even more of a surprise, since the actress they killed was the biggest star in the cast...

The effect was spectacular: 334 viewers complained. Messageboards all over the BBC website continued to buzz even two weeks after the event. Some people thought Faulkner would return from the dead. Others suspected she had a twin sister. What seemed to have shocked them was not the brutality of the death - not especially graphic in the normal run of TV drama - but that Spooks did what television almost never does. It killed off one of its leads in the second episode of a long-running series. And in mainstream TV you just do not do that.

Jane Featherstone, joint managing director of Spooks production company Kudos,laughs and looks a tiny bit guilty. "The Lisa thing actually came about because David Wolstencroft was writing the outline for episode two and we just couldn't get it right," she admits. "We really needed the series to get the green light and the strongest story we had was in episode 13, where a woman got her head set on fire. We'd seen Lisa but we weren't sure we were going to cast her, the best story we had was the climax, we needed the commission, so what were we going to do? I said, let's move the most dramatic thing you've got to episode two and kill off the only actress the audience recognise and then you've got them hooked. We hoped ..."

There's two things that are really interesting there. First, the idea (that just didn't play here) that they killed off a big name (in the UK) in the episode made the show even more shocking for the home audience. I think that's brilliant. The American equivalent was probably the first episode of The Shield, where Vic Mackey's bonafides were forever established by the way he took out Reed Diamond -- a face who fans of the genre recognized from Homicide.

The other interesting bit there, at least to me, is the way that the pressures of the medium constantly force you to move things up. The creator of 24 is on record as saying that in that initial season, they had every intention of having the assasination attempt on David Palmer happen in the finale. Instead, it wound up coming halfway through Season One.

I've said it before. Lord knows I'll say it again. TV is a beast. And the beast must be fed.

Great article. Great series. Thanks to Lee Thomson's blog for the tip.