British tv shows to stand alongside breaking bad the sopranos etc

but so good!

I'll give that a shot. I feel a bit bad sometimes that I pretty much spurn all homegrown TV drama in favour of the yanks (even the Danes get more of a look in).

One mention of Southcliffe above here and a short thread for it.

I only watched two episodes but I found it quite striking because it was so quiet and had a visual style that was really unusual for tv. Maybe a little bit Tarkovsky-ish? I've never seen another tv show like that, in a way it's just as cinema-like as Walking Dead or Breaking Bad.

There has been quite a few recent offbeat looking British tv shows but I never watched them. Utopia and Babylon I think.

I've never watched I Claudius, The Prisoner, Naked Civil Servent, Alec Guinness version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or that old show with Tim Roth as a criminal; but I always hear they are great.

Happy Valley was brilliant. I thought Keeley Hawes and Line of Duty had all the year's plaudits sewn up (rushed ending notwithstanding), but I've had a bit of a rethink of that now.

so state of play is really fuckin good huh

I liked the Honourable Woman

Both of these are good.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Happy Valley. Starts off as a fairly obvious Fargo ripoff and kind of runs out of steam by the end but Sarah Lancashire deserves all the plaudits she's gotten for it. She is incredible.

Broadchurch, on the other hand, was absolute shite.

Honourable Woman was absolute garbage

Britain seems to do better at one-off series with a set number of episodes. Brideshead Revisited, The Jewel in the Crown, Edge of Darkness and Our Friends in the North are all equal to or better than any of your US dramas.

Honourable Woman disqualified on account of the first three episodes imo

Is this the closest thing we have to a general British TV drama thread? Anyway, I finished watching Years and Years last night. Fantastic stuff.

I finished it last night too, would not go as far as fantastic, but it wasn't bad, afraid I'm too cynical to buy that ending with the fact that we run concentration camps in the UK of 2019 and nobody seems to care.

- Spoiler alert -

Really good but not fantastic otm. I really enjoyed the series (great cast and wow, Emma Thompson especially was brilliant). The penultimate episode was the best, but I thought the finale with the whole 'liberating Viktor' arch was a bit much. I don't think it's cynical per se: there's concentration camps all over the world (UK and US, too), but it hardly creates the stir it should.

But, as I said, pretty much great acting all around and RTD either got a lot of things right/made them scarily believable. It's just that some things aren't even predictions any more, they're real already :-/

Do wonder if there will be a second season, and if it can be 'not bonkers' after how this ended (with Edith uploaded in water molecules etc)

There will not be a second series.

the resolution will not be televised

Is this the closest thing we have to a general British TV drama thread?

I tried to get one going a (shockingly long) while back but it didn't take -

Rolling UK drama thread - "Paul Abbot, do you have David Simon's number by any chance?"

No programme that good should be tucked away on a rolling thread.