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The fact that many Americans can still sing the chorus to “Secret Agent Man” confirms Jeffrey Miller’s central thesis—that British programs have exerted a substantial influence on U.S. television since the 1960s. Arguing against “the myth” of U.S. television’s unilateral imperialism (7), Miller suggests that American TV has been colonized by British shows for more than four decades. To demonstrate the range of this British invigoration, Miller offers case studies of famous imports from a variety of genres, beginning with the James Bond-inspired spy programs exported from England during the 1960s—Secret Agent in 1964, The Avengers in 1966, and The Prisoner two years later. Next Miller cites the serial dramas that helped define and sustain the PBS during its infancy, “literate” soap operas like the BBC’s The Forsyte Saga in 1969 and the ratings powerhouse Upstairs, Downstairs, which was purchased from commercial British sources in 1974. 1974 also marked the debut of the sketch comedy Monty Python’s Flying Circus, a program Lorne Michaels (creator of Saturday Night Live) considered “a revelation,” carrying with it “winds of change” (80). Other notable examples during the 1970s were three American sitcoms whose direct sources were British. Norman Lear revamped Till Death Do Us Part to produce the ratings blockbuster All in the Family, while Lear’s Sanford and Son transported father and son junk dealers from lower-class England to Watts, racializing and softening the controversial characters central to Britain’s Steptoe and Son. With more modest alterations, Don Taffner turned Thames Television’s Man About the House into ABC’s long-running success Three’s Company—the premier episode of which was virtually a line-by-line remake of the original. Miller also reviews a cast of British characters who served as “mobile signifiers” on American television, like Patrick McGoohan as a chaste James Bond, Diana Rigg as a sex object flaunting a gun, or David Frost as the quintessential “Oxbridge” wit.

Miller discusses this long line of British offerings within a critical framework that inevitably addresses core issues of “assimilation, dominance and hegemony” (23). He recognizes, for example, that British productions were [End Page 201] typically received as higher-brow cultural products than those created in the United States, fulfilling the demand for “quality” television expected on PBS or on cable networks like A&E. Despite this naturalized assumption that “British is better” (20), Miller confirms that imports were inevitably “domesticated” and not fully dominant. Miller also undertakes to authenticate the generative influence of British creativity on American programming across history, arguing, for example, that The Forstye Saga begat CBS’s Beacon Hill, PBS’s Adams Chronicles, ABC’s Rich Man, Poor Man—and even Roots and Dallas. These claims forget the matrix of influences co-existing in the United States that made Roots and Dallas possible. Likewise, programs like Saturday Night Live or the more recent Whose Line Is It Anyway? derive in large part from the American tradition of improvisational comedy and not exclusively from British roots. Miller’s minor overstatements do not detract from the importance of his book, which provides a coherent and much-needed historical survey of British contributions.