In truth, British TV is now struggling to keep up with the scope and scale of America’s box-set epics, such as Mad Men, The Pacific and now Boardwalk Empire. These superb dramas have the production values (and budgets) of movies, and in most cases British broadcasters cannot compete. For example, an episode of the brilliantly observed period drama Cranford, one of the BBC’s most expensive series of recent years, cost far less to make than an episode of HBO’s The Wire, which was relatively cheap by the standards of US television.