David B Morris
2 min readMay 23, 2024

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That's what I call a dead parrot. I have a cunning plan.

I was blessed with the fact that one of the PBS outlets during the late 1990s and early 2000s showed many of the Britcomes you mentioned. I of course saw every Monty Python episode multiple times growing up, saw every episode of Black Adder, pretty much all of Red Dwarf, quite a bit of Fawlty Towers and all of Yes Minisiter and quite a bit of Yes Prime Minister.

Even at an early age I had an appreciate for British humor. I may be the only American in history who preferred the British version of Whose Line Is It Anyway to the American. (The Authors segment they did in the first two seasons always tickled my fancy as a constant reader and future writer.) I have to say I was never able to even tolerate RiCKY gERVAIS but he's an acquired taste. I know its not on your list because its not quite a comedy but I also enjoyed rerurns of As Time Goes By when PBS showed it. (For those of you who might not know it, that was a TV series Judi Dench did before American came to its senses and realized how brilliant she was.)

As a TV critic I have always appreciated so many of the british dramas and comedies I've seen over the years. Broadchurch was one of my favorite series when it debuted (that was my first exposure to Olivia Colman by the way) and as part of my following of the Emmys and other awards show I am often fortunate enough to discover so many great British shows, albeit much later than the general public. I managed to bingewatch all of Fleabag just in time for Phoebe Waller-Brdige to win every Emmy imaginable. I loved every moment of The Night Manager (when it aired on AMC) and I think that Daisy Haggard is one of the great talents I've encountered both in the just finished Breeders and the minor classic Back to Life. I'm also greatful that your comedies and dramas have so few episodes in a season because that means, when I inevitably fall behind in watching them, it's a lot easier to catch up. I started on Slow Horses a month ago and my guess is my the time Gary Oldman and the series are nominated for Emmys I'll have been fully caught up.

And seriously, you Brits creative tend to do things better than us. You give us Love Actually and we get gARRY Marshall's Valientine's Day et al. Seriously even when you export from us, you give a twist: I swear you're LAW AND ORDER: UK was more dignified.

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David B Morris

After years of laboring for love in my blog on TV, I have decided to expand my horizons by blogging about my great love to a new and hopefully wider field.