Most of you from Britain have probably already come across Stephen Fry‘s brilliant comment about British programmes being the equivalent of chicken nuggets:
They are like a chicken nugget. Every now and again we all like it … But if you are an adult you want something surprising, savoury, sharp, unusual, cosmopolitan, alien, challenging, complex, ambiguous, possibly even slightly disturbing and wrong. You want to try those things, because that’s what being adult means.
I totally agree with Fry. Though I do think he’s being too polite by commending Dr Who and Merlin on being “wonderfully written”. Dr Who occasionally has a decent episode, usually written by Steven Moffat, but most of the writers seem to rely on deus ex machina plot devices. Just watch last season’s Journey’s End for a prime example of this. I’m not saying that Dr Who needs to become hardcore sci-fi; rather, it’d be nice if the plot was actually challenging. Think Dr Who meets Sherlock Holmes. Still, unlike the terrible Merlin, Dr Who does manage to keep me watching every week — even if it’s only due to Cardiff having a spatio-temporal rift.