Once upon a time, being an Anglophile was a lonely business. Back in the era when “streaming” referred to trickles of water, fans of British television relied on PBS for its steady drip of ornate Masterpiece Theatre costume dramas and antic Monty Python episodes.

Public television peddled a kind of self-improvement myth—the notion that regular exposure to British accents could levitate you above the American masses. Even a 1970s Brit-com like Are You Being Served?—set in a London department store and oozing with innuendo—was treated as Noël Coward-level wit and refinement by PBS viewers long after it originally aired across the pond.

For most of TV history, broadcast networks simply assumed foreign fare would not appeal to average-Joe viewers. Rather than import series, they revamped British successes into something more American-shaped: All in the Family, Three’s Company, The Office, Shameless, House of Cards, and Veep were all adapted from Brit hits.

But streaming has taken a truncheon to so many preconceived notions about what we will watch—and one of the biggest misapprehensions is that Americans aren’t interested in shows from other corners of the world.

All you have to do is turn on Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Hulu and you’ll be awash in foreign-TV options you never knew you craved. There’s a deliciously bingeable series about the misadventures of Parisian celebrity agents (Call My Agent!); a hypnotic Weimar-era German thriller (Babylon Berlin); a sophisticated Indian crime saga (Sacred Games); and a sharp-edged dramedy about an Iranian-American bisexual woman abroad in London (The Bisexual).

There’s even a streaming service devoted to Anglophile nostalgia, as well as to new series. Called BritBox, it offers all those old PBS staples like Brideshead Revisited, Fawlty Towers, Inspector Morse, and—crikey!—Are You Being Served?

One reason for the pan-global bounty of contemporary television is that it’s relatively inexpensive for streamers to fill their libraries by licensing from or partnering with, say, a British network—as Netflix did to obtain series like Bodyguard and The Crown, and as Amazon did to land Fleabag. That show became a cultural touchpoint, and The Crown and Bodyguard won Netflix many prestigious awards, not to mention a huge number of viewers around the world. Programming for an international market has become so successful for Netflix that it has something like 180 co-productions planned for 2019.

While American politics is currently roiled by arguments about closing borders and protecting the economy with tariffs and torn-up trade agreements, streaming is going in the opposite direction. From a globe-trotting cooking show like Salt Fat Acid Heat to the Icelandic cop show Trapped, television is opening us up to the wider world in a way that was almost unthinkable even a decade ago.

Despite the current spasm of nativism that is convulsing our civic life, our televisions, tablets, and laptops are gently, insidiously, turning us into cosmopolitans. Plunged into the heart of Mexico City as we watch the narco-novela Ingobernable, or enveloped by the bucolic hills of Wales surrounding the teenagers of Sex Education, we absorb the speech rhythms and social quirks of other cultures, the sensuous near infinity of ways there are to dress, eat, decorate, and play on this planet. Tourism minus the jet lag and bad airline food, streaming-era TV is teaching us to rejoice in difference and revel in variety.

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