Jeffrey S. Miller,
Something Completely Different: British Television and American Culture
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
ISBN 0 8166 3241 3
250 pp
US$17.95

(Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press)

Uploaded 1 December 2001 | Modified on 2 January 2002

The cosmopolitan society of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand finds Jeffrey Miller’s thesis ludicrous. The idea that British television has had the opportunity to influence American television is itself unacceptable. So the assertion that that influence has been substantial, identifiable, and significant gets short shrift.

Everyone knows that cultural influence flows out of the United States, swamping local culture wherever it arrives, replacing unique local identities with homogenized, least-common-denominator material propagating U.S. consumer products and a corporate capitalist ideology. As Paul Swann writes, “Relatively little has been written on foreign media inside the U.S.” (“The British Culture Industries and the Mythology of the American Market: Cultural Policy and Cultural Exports in the 1940s and 1990s,” Cinema Journal 39.4 (Summer) 2000: 39, fn 1). Swain himself focuses on film rather than television. Thus, Miller’s work stands out for its subject matter alone. His audacious thesis is the icing on the cake.

Miller’s research reasonably demonstrates support for his assertions. He provides a general historical outline along with convincing examples of the British influence’s significance in terms of its effect on genre, characters, visual style, and narrative structure. Making his case on a factual basis, he draws his analysis to its logical conclusion: Dallas is the descendant of all those Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) broadcasts of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) productions on Masterpiece Theatre:

the British serialized historical drama had worked its way through the American commercial television system to emerge at the end of the 1970s as a soap opera of the rich and famous: The Forsyte Saga and Elizabeth R had finally become the saga of Southfork and J.R. . . . British influence had become such a commonplace in American television that it was no longer a novelty . . .What once seemed completely different was, by 1980, as American as cowboy hats, bourbon and branch, and a roll in the hay with the head of an international oil cartel (167-68).

Part of the history that Miller provides is the association between the politics of oil cartels in the 1970s, Nixon’s dislike of the media (especially television), and the start in the United States of both the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the PBS. PBS was supposed to be an alternative to commercial TV, both in its lack of advertising and ties to advertisers as well as in the quality of its material. It was meant to be educational and entertaining, particularly appealing to middle-to-high-brow audiences with financial wealth and cultural capital. Mobil Oil Corporation was in need of a better public profile, preferably with a majority of U.S. opinion rooted in the educated and affluent middle class.

Miller notes the known connection between Mobil, PBS, and the development of Masterpiece Theatre as a production arrangement between WGBH and the BBC. In addition he traces what is perhaps a lesser known connection between British commercial television productions and developments in U.S. commercial television, from the direct import of shows such as The Avengers to the revision into U.S. contexts of British-originated sitcoms such as All in the Family/Till Death Us Do Part and Sanford and Son/Steptoe and Son through to cult rebroadcasts of such shows as The Prisoner and Dr. Who. He situates both developments within an analysis he attributes to Bakhtin, in which dominant ideology may be challenged by readings that, originating in slightly different cultures, may pose “visible and audible” (183) alternatives to ideologies of containment. Unlike:

totalizing concepts of imperialism, hegemony, or assimilation, Bakhtin’s theory also allows for the desirability of difference evident in every example of American reception of British television presented here. As might be expected from that theory, the significance of that difference varied . . .from instance to instance: it offered cohesion during a period of national trauma; it made a strong British female character a viable role model to American women; it affirmed the elite status of public broadcasting viewers; it provided American producers with a new means of entering the commercial marketplace (182).

In a massively footnoted text (the footnotes unfortunately not being part of what is indexed), Miller has done a good job of contextualizing the specific aspects of his thesis within the larger context of British and, primarily, U.S. television history. Miller identifies two strands of influence: that associated with commercial television, such as The Avengers and That Was The Week That Was, and shows that became source material for successful U.S. translations, such as All in the Family and Sanford and Son, on the one hand, and that associated with the BBC and WGBH/PBS and eventually A&E, such as The Forsyte Saga and all the other literary adaptations (of James, of Austen, of anyone who was anyone) into quality programming. One fact that Miller cites curiously draws these two strands together: “With the final approval of network owner William Paley, Wood and his programmers scheduled Lear’s version of Till Death us do Part to go on the air in January 1971 – the same week in which PBS and Mobil would introduce Masterpiece Theatre in their own use of British programming for demographic purposes” (143).

Miller writes convincingly of the impact of British visual style, as he details the gradual acceptance by U.S. networks of British video practices, in contrast with U.S. demands for filmed material. He’s equally careful to identify U.S. changes to British material, situating those changes within their distinct cultures. If not perhaps the “landmark” claimed by Toby Miller on the back cover blurb, much of what Jeffrey Miller has written in Something Completely Different should be considered a major contribution to the fields of television and cultural studies.

Harriet Margolis