Exploring The Attraction of American Television Programmes to UK Citizens

How many US television programmes do you watch? If you live in the UK you may have lots of American based television programmes that you would count among your favourites. This article explores why this is the case.

If you live in the UK you will know that there are lots of television programmes shown on TV every single night. Many of these are terrestrial in nature, i.e. they are created and produced in this country. But many of them are bought from abroad, and many of them come from America.

Not everyone likes watching US television programmes. But most of us would probably agree that we have one or two programmes from the US that we would not like to miss. Satellite channels such as Sky Atlantic and Sky Entertainment Extra have provided us with access to more American programming than ever before. This is why more and more people in the UK are enjoying programmes that are made in America.

But why are these programmes so popular? One of the reasons is that they show us part of American society. We get to see certain cities, towns and locations in great detail. We may never have visited these locations before and there is every chance we never will. Even if we visit one or two American cities in the future, we can never hope to visit as many as we can see on the television every night.

These programmes also give us an insight into what America is like. For example we can see New York through the eyes of a cop on Sky Atlantic. We could even walk into one of their hospitals in a virtual way, to see what goes on there. There are also opportunities to explore other parts of American cities, and some programmes will take us back into the American past to see how life was lived back then.

Even though many of these programmes are not completely true to life, they still show us more of America than we would ever get to see otherwise. This is part of the reason why we look for US television programmes when we have access to Sky Entertainment Extra. It gives us the opportunity to explore the world and to see what happens – and what happened in the past – in the US.

Conversely Americans love to watch some of our programmes because they can see how life is lived in the UK. We know that some programmes are not realistic but we also know that they do give a reasonable overview of how the UK is in certain respects. Dramatic licence means that the programme creators can be creative in showing us what life is like in certain towns and cities. And it doesn’t stop there. American programme makers can take us into the countryside too, showing us how life is lived in those regions.

In short, we get to visit every part of America through our TV screens.