Oddly, my wife and I enjoy British TV dramas much more than those that originate here.

Our favorite at the moment is Downton Abbey because it has a wealth of interesting characters that range from the sympathetic to the downright beastly. With only one episode scheduled to air in the season, we want to know if Bates murdered Green.

Those of you who live in the UK can tell us because we run a season behind you. Please, if you share our interest, tell us!

So it's a show about how the nouveau riche are having trouble being accepted into high society?

Are tv shows the same as tv series? If yes, I like The Game of Thrones.
Not as good as Roma, from the same producers I suppose, but the best thing that can be seen in television today.

Of course, with popularity, it will dive into an insupportable pastiche of itself.

Technically a series is a particular kind of show (i.e. a recurring one) but in the context of this post I don't think anyone is talking about one-time specials.

Are tv shows the same as tv series? If yes, I like The Game of Thrones.
Not as good as Roma, from the same producers I suppose, but the best thing that can be seen in television today.

Of course, with popularity, it will dive into an insupportable pastiche of itself.

You could claim that A Song of Ice and Fire/The Game of Thrones is already a pastiche of the War of the Roses and other English and European history (and beyond to Asia and Africa). Westeros is a kind of a Late Medieval Europe with the sex, violence, and treachery dialled up.

If you like sexed-up history like Rome and sexed-up pseudo-history like GoT, as do I, you would probably enjoy series like The Tudors and The Borgias as well.

You could claim that A Song of Ice and Fire/The Game of Thrones is already a pastiche of the War of the Roses and other English and European history (and beyond to Asia and Africa). Westeros is a kind of a Late Medieval Europe with the sex, violence, and treachery dialled up.

If you like sexed-up history like Rome and sexed-up pseudo-history like GoT, as do I, you would probably enjoy series like The Tudors and The Borgias as well.

GoT and Roma have their own merit that separates them (each one at it's way) from the other series you mention.
The inclusion of a decent amount of boobies is certainly welcome but it goes further than that.

Roma tried to be a portrait of the entire Roman society, with all social classes, while maintaining a reasonable amount of Historical likelihood. Fictionally, they created an ensemble of interconnected characters, ranging from the very low to the higher possible classes, who's mixed destinies explained History.
Innovative and brightly done. The other series you say just does the traditional, focusing on the life of the powerful, the usual thing.
The historical recreation of life at those times was brilliant.

Game of Thrones, yes it recreates a Middle age full of sex, violence and treason but it adds an element of fantastic. The formula is not new but the way it's done, is superb.
Instead a final product that would be sordid or, even worst, something like Lord of the Rings it results at probably the higher moment in fiction that television has ever created.
It's going to be very very difficult to do better. GoT is at a different championship.


Of course, as Mary Pickford says at my sig, I'm totally against what I above said.

I am purely pragmatic. If a sea of naked breasts is what it takes for ridiculously costly series to succeed, bring them on. Roman society, not to speak of Medieval European society in most centuries, was allegedly fairly puritan and hypocritical, and not the sequence of Roman orgies and debaucheries fantasised about, just like rock'n'roll usually isn't as rock'n'roll as legend would have it.

But as long as the characters think as Romans and not as thinly veiled morality play figurines in a toga, libertine liberties are quite acceptable. Likewise God and a mystical universe was real to the Medieval world, and people behaved thereafter. The characters might be villainous, nasty, and treacherous, but still unwilling to risk going to Hell.  The plot and the setting in these modern series might have upped the viewer attraction beyond the realistic, but still with  fidelity to the historical setting and world view. That is why I am less keen on The Vikings, which I should have been enthusiastic about, as it has too many shortcomings as TV and in reaching the appropriate mind space.

Roman society, not to speak of Medieval European society in most centuries, was allegedly fairly puritan and hypocritical, and not the sequence of Roman orgies and debaucheries fantasised about, just like rock'n'roll usually isn't as rock'n'roll as legend would have it.

Maybe we were closer to the truth by saying that those societies were simultaneously puritan and hypocritical and a sequence of orgies and debaucheries.
Such is life and always has been and will be.

What's this TV thing? Quit talking nonsense, people

During my holidays I had the time to watch some episodes from a French tv series very interesting, Un Village Français.

Life at the Jura during the German occupation at WWII.
So refreshing to listen to people speaking French against the anglo saxon attempt of cultural colonization.

I'm not sure if the second most influential language in the world necessarily counts as a valiant act of resistance.