By all accounts Britcoms seem to go down well in the US. Is this also true for British police series . I think Prime Suspect has been well received. Have other shows also made their way over there?. I am thinking of such programmes as Inspector Morse , Frost and Taggart.
I would call those ‘detective series’. I would define Police series’ as more like ‘the bill’ and ‘merseybeat’
Sorry. Carry on…
The Thin Blue Line (Rowan Atkinson; not one of his better characters but still funny)
The Bill - dire police soap, same boredom factor for me as Eastenders, which didnt go down too well in USA I am told
Prime suspect was my first introduction to the crime drama genre, and what an introduction it was. I was about 16 when I saw the first one, and Tennyson/Mirren had a big impact one me. A great character and a great actress.
Touching Evil is another great one I’ve really liked.
Morse (RIP John Thaw :() has been on PBS and A&E here, the same with Frost. I’ve never seen Taggart, but that doesn’t mean it’s never been on.
Inspector Morse was a success for PBS. As a matter of fact, PBS has a series that features BBC crime dramas; it’s called “Mystery” and over the years they have run quite a few of them. The Rumpole stories have particularly successful.
I really liked Second Sight, which had Clive Owen as a detective on the verge of going blind from what I can only assume(Have’n’t seen enough to know for sure) is some sort of heredetary disease.
Slight correction. Neither Morse or Rumpole were BBC productions - there were from various ITV companies . This also applies to Morse and Taggart.
That was a good one too!
The two lead detectives are a lord/earl/duke and a woman with a senile parent. The name of the show is the lord/earl/duke’s name. Whatever it is, I liked it quite a bit and hope there’s more to the series than the few I saw.
The only one I can think of that matches this is The Inspector Lindley Mysteries based on the books by the American writer Elizabeth George.
I see from further research that Inspector Lindley is also known as Lord Asherton so that could be the show you are thinking about.
Lynley! That’s it. Thanks. 
Did “Between the Lines” from the early 90s ever make it to American TV? That was one of my favourites.
Between the Lines was excellent. I saw it on Australian TV and really loved it. I actually have a soft spot for The Bill - though I left Australia about when it took a turn for the soapish, I used to watch it back when it was mostly police procedural and fairly dry.
I used to love The Bill. When I started seeing it turn soapy, when all the new female cops were all pretty and young and sleeping with the other cops, and entire episodes had no police stuff in it, that’s when I knew it was time to leave. Now apparently everybody keeps getting killed off, and nobody I remember from it (only two years back) is in it anymore.
I don’t know why they didn’t just start a spinoff series for the soapy crap, and keep the standard The Bill series going. It’s not like they need a big budget for it.
Does MI-5 count?
<minor hijack>
Can someone explain Prime Suspect’s intention to me? I don’t know how they aired in the UK, but in the US the installments range between 1 and 4 hours long; more clock in at 2 hours than 1 I think. I can’t figure out if this is supposed to be a tv show or a series of movies…
</minor hijack>
Well, if we can include the “Thin Blue Line” (which to me was a so-so Brit-Com), then maybe we can also list the BritCom “The Detectives” (which was on PBS [channel 21 here on Long Island - Friday was BritCom night!] during the mid-90s (yeah, OK, it’s kinda detective series - Sorry) - which had 2 bumbling detectives who more or less accidently stumbled on the solutions to the cases they were tracking (not half as bad as it sounds - actually, I thought it was pretty funny).
Guide to British Sitcoms - ‘D’
Search for “The Detectives” on that page (wow, it ran for 4 seasons to 1997 - yes, I know 6 shows are usually a season, but still 24 episodes?)
Excellent!
I think that was the idea - it’s not supposed to fit in those boxes.
Thing is, it’s neither teevee show or movie. What it does - and few others attempt this – is to both exploit and demonstrate the unique potential of teevee as an entertainment medium, to do stuff neither cinema or the awkward 30/60min teeevee format can do (fwiw, I believe Dennis Potter (in his work for the BBC, ‘Prime Suspect isn’t a BBC production) was the originator and master of this (almost) genre).
So . . . Potter and Prime Suspect show us that the teevee format has unique qualities that, because there is so much to admire in the end result, it’s easy to not notice. For example; putting aside the more obvious stuff like more and longer scenes in which to develop Tennyson and other characters, the pace of the whole becomes quite distinct from either conventional teevee or film. Example; just following someone with a hand held through corridors as they say hello into offices before arriving somewhere for the actual scene’. The gaps, the silences between offices and snatches of conversation; all of a sudden you not only understand the working environment and the types of relationships people at his/her work have - background depth that only come when you’ve got four hours to play with – you do it at their real-life pace, not the ‘cut’ artificially forced pace of say ER; the sratch of a head, a cough, the sounds of clothes brushing through office corridors . . . maybe its more difficult to explain than I thought
So, its about depth and sheer space that neither the conventional teevee model or cinema can exploit can’t they aren’t permitted time. That’s what gives it such a distinct feel that, really, amounts to a (grand movie-sized, and bigger) genre distinct to teevee.
That’s my take, anyway