I’d take this news of study with a large grain of salt—or maybe some well-buttered crumpets, because it’s English, and I do adore me some crumpets—because the authors only interviewed 77 people involved in television and film production. But it’s interesting to see the extent to which a new report reveals that people who work in those industries in the UK feel that class still plays a major role in determining who’s able to gain entry to jobs and to influence:

A survey of professionals in the industry has found that working-class people are discriminated against because they do not have the “right accents, hairstyles, clothes or backgrounds.”

Presenting the study yesterday at the British Sociological Association’s annual conference, researchers said people from working-class backgrounds, women and those from ethnic minorities did form networks within the industry, but they were not as powerful and were “discriminated against because they were not trusted insiders.”

“Most jobs were gained through friends and friends of friends,” the researchers from Durham University and the University of St Andrews said. “Openings were rarely advertised and producers tended to rely on the grapevine.”

It’s not that this is totally different from the American entertainment industry. But I was struck by the sense that class is so legible in the UK. Perhaps this is only my experience, but I’ve always read accents as regional markers and grammar as a class marker: what shows Boyd Crowder is a Kentuckian as his accent, and his syntax and use of words like “ain’t” show that he’s less educated than other characters. It’s got to be incredibly frustrated to be judged by something that’s hardwired into you before you have a chance to know that it might be important. And it’s a worthwhile reminder that there’s no perfect, bias-free entertainment industry out there in another country for us to emulate. We’re all stuck replicating our prejudices and class systems.

The ratings are in for the last episode of Downton Abbey, and PBS has got to be thrilled—5.4 million people tuned in to see Matthew Crawley and Lady Mary finally get engaged. Those are numbers that in some slots, NBC would die to have. And as the Daily Beast reported last week, the show hasn’t just drawn good numbers: it’s helped PBS pull in new donations. But Downton Abbey‘s only one show, and the last time the network pulled numbers like this was for Ken Burns’ series on the America’s national parks. That doesn’t exactly provide a clear guide to what PBS might build its brand into.

I suggested in January, and I still believe, that PBS could rebuild by airing a lot of British content that isn’t widely available over here. Hulu’s been able to make some inroads by airing Misfits, Party Animals, and The Only Way Is Essex, the kind of show that one would think would land on BBC America but didn’t. PBS could go the same route, but the shorter runs of British shows means they’d have to come up with a ton of material to fill the schedule. And not all of the options for promising British shows, be it Luther or Misfits, share what I think is a crucial attribute of Downton Abbey: it’s very family friendly. Certainly we know that Lady Mary had sex, and people suffer grievous war wounds, but there’s a world of difference between Mr. Pamuk’s death and the sex scenes in Misfits, or seeing bandaged fake Patrick and seeing the victims in Luther. Your mileage may vary, but I think you could watch Downton Abbey with a sophisticated 10-year-old, give or take a few years, and I think it’s a good thing to have shows available that a family can watch across the generations.

And finding that sort of programming is hard. I think what Ken Burns does is noble, but he can’t turn out these documentaries very quickly, and I don’t know that there’s an audience for more of them. ABC Family’s shows may be accessible to a wide age range of viewers, but I’m not sure they’re really intended to draw in adults. Finding something that’s genuinely appealing in a cross-generational way, rather than simply broadly age-appropriate, is tremendously difficult, and it’s not a code I’m sure anyone’s consistently cracked. I’d really like to see some creative experimentation with age-appropriateness as a starting constraint rather than an end goal. There are stories where sex, drugs salty language, and all the other things parents might want to wait to expose their kids to are essential. But that’s not true for every human story.

Downton Abbey scored 4.2 million viewers in its return on Sunday, 1.28 million viewers more than Mad Men averaged in its most recent season and just 280,000 viewers below what Community averaged in its second season (in other words, numbers NBC would like to see again as a minimum). The numbers are cheering if only because it’s nice to see that public television can score a program that’s as compelling as network offerings, that if public broadcasting is to be the bastion of eggheads and intellectuals, that there are 4.2 million of them willing to turn out to support quality programming.

But what does it mean for what kind of slate PBS might put together? I’ve been having some trouble finding ratings for the U.S. airing of Sherlock on PBS, but it certainly seems at least like an anecdotal success. Luther got poor ratings on BBC America, which may be a product of the network’s availability as a standard part of cable packages, despite the fact that it seems like a logical crossover for those of us nostalgic for The Wire. I wonder if it might have been more successful on PBS, and helped PBS build a bit of edgy cred, as Luther is nothing if not often and significantly uncomfortable. I do think it’s a challenge for PBS, both in terms of its public support and building a broader audience long-term, to be seen as too British. But how awesome would a drama block that starts with Downton, continues to Sherlock, and ends with Luther be?

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: if you’re not watching Idris Elba’s turn as a not-particularly-mentally-healthy police detective in Luther (which, as I write in The Atlantic today, may be the scariest show on television), you are missing. out. Whether the show’s making callbacks to London’s artistic history, tapping the underpinnings of racism in the U.K. to fuel unnerving crime sprees, or exploring the alienation of returning servicemembers, the show jumps off big issues to profoundly new and strange places. And Elba is fantastic in a role that gives him far greater range than playing Stringer Bell ever did, alternately wounded, sly, and forceful.

In preparation for the second series finale, which airs on BBC America tonight, I interviewed the show’s producer Phillippa Giles, and asked her about something that, as an American viewer, has always stood out to me. Whether it’s Luther’s South Asian wife, his white female boss in the first series, his friendship with the murderous but charming Alice Morgan (Ruth Wilson), and in this series, the fatherly interest he takes in a the daughter of a friend who’s been working in pornography and as a prostitute (watch out for an adorable scene between them tonight), the show is full of interracial relationships that range from the emotionally and sexually intimate, to the professionally bracing. In an environment where it’s striking when advertising campaigns start subtly including interracial couples and when our entertainment can seem rigidly divided between black and white audiences and black and white casts, Luther‘s profoundly refreshing.

“It was nothing to do with black or white,” Giles said of the casting of Ruth Wilson to play Alice Morgan. “Obviously it looks really good, you’ve got a red-headed woman and a dark guy, so that wasn’t bad. We would have cast anybody that had what Alice needs. It was just color-blind casting.”

When I told her how fresh the show’s approach to race — not quite a neutrality, but an insistence that race can be a factor without being the sole focus — felt to me, Giles said she was surprised.

“We always think we’re behind the States,” she told me. “We always color-blind cast. We thought we were copying you. We had no idea that you would feel that that was…Idris is brilliant. Not only is he a mentor to black writers, BBC has a development deal to bring on young black writers. He said he wanted us to try to reflect the country. We’ve tried really hard. We didn’t achieve that.” And when the show introduced an ambitious young black female detective to Luther’s team this year, Giles notes,
“She was written to be cast black or white. We really enjoyed that she was black.”

And I think that’s perfect. When shows and movies assume by default characters will be white and that if they’re going to end up black, or Latino, or Asian, that isn’t a neutral choice. There are stories that are driven by particular racial dynamics, and in that case, it may be important to, say, have a cop be white and a subject of an investigation be black. But if your story doesn’t absolutely require that characters be of a certain race or ethnicity, trying to eliminate any assumption about which race they’ll be before you cast a specific actor to play them seems like a decent rule of thumb. That may take a little work for white creators, but it’s not exactly onerous. And it’s something that Luther gets right and makes the show more fun to watch, both visually and narratively.

As part of $1 billion in cost savings, the BBC is going to cut 12 percent of its staff. As a British television nerd, I am, of course, sad to hear this, and as someone who cares about good reporting, especially concerned to hear that about half of the cuts will be in news. It’s a reminder of how great it would be to get more British content more widely syndicated in the U.S., whether it’s Hulu streaming Misfits, or getting a lot of the content that’s available through DVD only on Netflix available streaming, or getting shows on networks other than BBC America. I would dearly love to be more of a revenue stream for the BBC.

I’m on a bit of a sprint to watch at least the core of Torchood so I can properly analyze Torchwood: Miracle Day when it premieres in July. Two things that are striking me about the show so far, other than the whole pansexual space pirate thing, which is the most obvious vector for analysis. First, both the Doctor Who and Torchwood universes do really nice work when they tell stories about fans. And second, Torchwood feels, at least in the early going, a little institutionally unmoored.

I’m not entirely caught up with the rebooted Doctor Who yet, but one of the episodes I’ve watched that touched me most was “Love & Monsters,” which is essentially about a fan-and-mild-conspiracies club of people who believe the Doctor exists, and what happens first when that belief becomes secondary to the members’ friendships, and then when they actually, desperately need him to be real. There is a monster, to be sure, but he’s not really the point. The episode’s a fairly tender story about how wonderful it is to discover you’re not alone in your interests and your passions, and how those interests can be a critically important icebreaker, particularly if you’re not great at the work of conventional socializing. In the first season of Torchwood, “Random Shoes” does takes a different approach to a similar theme. A young man who’s seen his early promise slip away, and who clings to an interest in and belief in aliens as the last thing that makes him special, finds that after his death, that love makes it possible for him to undertake one last heroic act. Obviously it makes sense for shows like these to write Valentines to their fans, but they’re a nice acknowledgement of the fact that it’s increasingly easy to have fandom as an organizing principal for your life, and as a result, it’s (at least anecdotally) increasingly common and increasingly important way to arrange your social life.

On a less positive note, though, one of the things I like least about Torchwood so far is the extent to which the organization is isolated. Obviously, Torchwood Three has some kind of relationship with the Cardiff police, which gets vexed with their supernatural counterparts. And there were multiple branches of Torchwood. But we don’t get a sense of any institutional tension between Torchwood and more conventional law enforcement: the team tends to be able to just waltz into crime scenes, and to turn human offenders like the murders in “Countrycide” over to the cops without any real need to conceal their existence. The relationship’s an irritant than a real constraint on Torchwood’s operations.

Similarly, the fact that Torchwood Three appears to be the only functional branch of the institute isn’t actually a good thing for the show. We don’t get a training montage that really introduced Gwen to Torchwood’s practices and traditions, which would be both a fun thing to do, a great way to introduce viewers to the world the creators are building, and a good way to establish the constraints Torchwood agents work under. Without constraints, it’s hard to know what it means to be a Torchwood agent. As is, they’re basically private dicks who know that aliens are out there. My understanding is that we get more context later for why Torchwood Three is what’s left. But even if, and especially if, they’re what remains of a tradition, that should be an interesting burden to carry out, a legacy to carry on, something that should be part of Gwen’s experience and ours.