British TV dystopias

[kindkit]

I'm intrigued by the fact that series with the premise "in the future, our country is a quasi-fascist dystopia" are common enough on British TV, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, that you could call them a sub-genre. (I've just started watching one such show, The Guardians, which so far is excellent.) By contrast, I can't think of single example of this premise on US television, from that period or in fact ever.

Cultural difference? Or am I just not remembering US examples?

Comments

[shadowvalkyrie]

I'd say it's a cultural difference. British TV tends to be a lot darker and more socially pessimistic in general. (Take the also typically British Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist, compared to the US comedy protagonist, who is normally a lovable loser. TV tropes has a list of examples on that one.)

Add to that the US obsession with patriotism that practically forbids painting a dark future for that oh-so-perfect country... voilá, no dystopias.

Plus, you could argue that the US is stricken by a general lack of public awareness about civil liberties being eroded or straight-out taken away, e.g. the "anti-terror" laws of the Bush administration, Arizona's anti-immigrant laws, the whole ongoing religious-rights-before-women's-rights debate, and so on. If no one sees it as a problem and fears subsequent developments, no one is going to write TV shows about it.

[oursin]

I'd guess that this is riffing off a longer-standing literary trope, going back at least to the 1930s (i.e Before Orwell and 1984), through the 50s and 60s (losing the war, or collaborationist government takes over). Would there be the same kind of subgenre in the USA?

[kangeiko]

well... I guess you could argue that the UK was a bit closer to experiencing these dystopias, and people were therefore thinking about it a bit more. You have the very real impact of WWII - not just the impact on the populace, but the exposure of what had been going on 'just down the road' - and then you had the aftermath, which, unlike the US, was not a boom. The austerity years then followed for a very long time, and a whole generation grew up with that. Then there were the 70s, and things really did seem like they were falling apart - massive unemployment, strikes, power cuts, riots, etc - stretching into the 80s. So there was only a brief flicker of optimism vs many many years of things being rather grim. That is bound to have an impact. And I do think that the literature and TV of the era is emlblematic of that - a gradual surrender to totalitarianism, starvation and shortages, complex and remote wars, etc. Where as at the same time the US was generating its own nightmare TV and literature, focused on the fear of the loss of national identity, e.g. MASH (& there are others, I'm just not up on my 70s US tv). Susan Faludi's Stripped: The Betrayal of the Modern Man talks about the fears and nightmares of the US psyche at that time.

So (tl;dr), I don't think that American didn't produce its own dystopian visions; I just think that they were very different from the UK ones.

[redscharlach.livejournal.com]

The only equivalent I can think of the mini-series Amerika (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerika_%28TV_miniseries%29), which was about a Commie dystopia!

And I suppose you might stretch the definition to count the original version of V, but since the "fascists" came down from space, that's rather different from the "what horrors may rise from our own society?" fears that are inherent in the British stuff.

[lilacsigil]

Huh. I can't think of any US examples either, but this seems like such a common storyline to me! Maybe I just read too much Judge Dredd as a kid.

[st_aurafina]

Nope, can't think of any US examples. But omg, the things I watched and read in the 80's!