Can't beat Netflix? New streaming services offer up British shows

When you want to start a streaming service and your most established competitor has for years been spending billions of dollars making and acquiring exclusive series, what do you do?

Disney+ and Apple TV+ chose to go halfway when they debuted last year, addressing Netflix's unassailable lead with offerings of original shows that, in each case, amounted to more than a handful but less than a roster.

This year, Peacock and HBO Max have gone for what could be called the British option.

Behind each service's first marquee series - Love Life for HBO Max, Brave New World for Peacock - the section devoted to originals has been filled out with shows made and already seen across the Atlantic.

The Special Relationship may not have the geopolitical juice it once had, but it is alive and well in streaming video. Peacock, which made its debut in the United States last Wednesday, opened with just three original scripted series for adults, two of them British.

On the surface, the imports are quite different from each other: The Capture (2019 to present), from BBC, is an hour-long, tightly wound conspiracy thriller; while the workplace sitcom Intelligence (2020 to present), from Sky, is a 22-minute goof.

But if you look past genre, they have some things in common. Both are cautionary tales about the British intelligence services.

The Capture warns that the spies are stealing your liberties and will disappear you if you protest. Intelligence warns that they are marginally competent wackos more interested in food delivery and photocopier high jinks than in preventing cyber terror.

More interesting, given their prominent placement on Peacock, is that both employ a favourite British target: the ugly American. The shortcomings of the British characters are finessed by shifting attention to an American interloper whose malignancy is exceeded only by his shallowness.

In The Capture, he is a cool operative running an off-the-books surveillance operation in London and pulling the strings of his peers in the British spy and police services. This would constitute a spoiler, as he does not show up right away in the engagingly convoluted story, if Ron Perlman's name were not so prominent in the credits.

In Intelligence, he is a National Security Agency liaison to Britain's cyber-terrorism unit, and it probably says all you need to know about the show's view of Americans that the hammer-headed, narcissistic character is played by David Schwimmer, that avatar of hammer-headed American narcissism.

Intelligence is mild tea overall, but it is an easy binge at just over two hours for its six episodes.

The Capture, also a six-parter, is the better of the Peacock imports, a reasonably entertaining and well-constructed - at least in its early episodes - example of a classic style of British television conspiracy thriller, most recently seen in Bodyguard on BBC and Netflix.

Its hook is surveillance culture, and it posits that British law enforcement, with American help, is not only employing the kind of facial-recognition software popular in China, but has also moved onto more advanced and sinister uses of video technology.

The series, written and directed by Ben Chanan (The Missing, 2014 to 2016), teases a larger theme about storytelling - that governments can use technology to fictionalise their citizens' lives - but it mostly settles for being a straightforward thriller with the stylistic tic of often presenting the action through closed-circuit cameras.

The show holds up fairly well if you are the kind of conspiracy story fan who is satisfied when each step proceeds more or less plausibly from the step before. If you are the kind of fan who wants the overall plot to feel as if it could actually take place in the real world, well, good luck.

If there is a larger point to the inclusion of The Capture and Intelligence in Peacock's initial line-up, it may have to do with the smaller role that such "originals" are playing while services promote their libraries of older series and franchise movies to counter Netflix's focus on the new.

The British shows HBO Max launched with, like Ghosts and Home, have largely disappeared from the home page a few months later. And the tier for Peacock Originals is several levels down, well below Jurassic Park (1993 to 2001) and 30 Rock (2006 to 2013).

If you want something different, you need to find it yourself.

NYTIMES