There is a particular moment when you start watching enough international television and realise that the programmes you remember most are rarely the ones trying hardest to impress you.
They are the ones that look like somewhere.
A Welsh house surrounded by water.
A Swedish detective standing beneath a sky that appears to have forgotten daylight.
A dusty Australian road stretching towards absolutely nothing.
An Italian apartment where the kitchen looks as though somebody genuinely cooked in it that morning.
A French provincial police station that has not been redesigned because somebody thought international viewers might prefer something more stylish.
These places are not perfect.
That is exactly why I believe them.
And increasingly, I find myself grateful for the production companies, broadcasters, distributors and curators that have resisted the idea that successful television must somehow bIn Praise of Television That Still Looks Like Somewhere
ecome more American in order to travel.
I should make something clear here.
This is not an argument against American television. America has produced some extraordinary television and some extraordinary actors, writers and directors.
It is an argument against imitation.
Against the assumption that international success requires gloss.
Against the belief that every detective needs an immaculate apartment, every city must shimmer at night, every police department needs impossible glass walls and every actor must look as though somebody has just removed every ordinary feature from their face.
Sometimes I want the wallpaper to be ugly.
Sometimes I want the coat to look five years old.
Sometimes I want the detective to be tired.
Sometimes I want the town to look exactly as it does on a Tuesday afternoon in February.
Because that is where stories live.
The Smaller the World, the Bigger the Story
Some of the most memorable television I have watched has come from productions that seem completely uninterested in pretending their world is larger, richer or more glamorous than it really is.
Hidden is a perfect example.
Its North Wales is spectacular, but the series never treats it like a tourism advert. There are mountains, water and enormous skies, but there are also difficult homes, ordinary streets, economic pressure, young people who feel trapped and communities carrying things they would rather not discuss.
The company behind Hidden, Severn Screen, describes itself simply as an independent film and television production company based in Wales. Its work includes Hidden/Craith, The Pembrokeshire Murders and Steeltown Murders. Hidden itself was made by Severn Screen for S4C and BBC Wales.
That matters.
Because an independent company working within Wales is not looking at Wales from the outside and wondering how to make it recognisable to an international audience.
It already recognises it.
There is an enormous difference.
And This Is Why S4C Matters
The broadcaster is part of this ecosystem too.
S4C commissions the majority of its content from independent production companies and exists specifically as a Welsh-language national broadcaster. That means local production is not an occasional experiment. It is built into the structure.
Think about what that protects.
Language.
Regional actors.
Writers.
Production crews.
Places that might otherwise never appear on television.
Stories that do not have to relocate themselves to London to become important.
When we watch something like Craith in Welsh, we are not simply watching the same crime drama with different words underneath it.
Language changes rhythm.
It changes humour.
It changes intimacy.
It changes the way families speak to each other.
And it tells us immediately that the people making the programme are not frightened of specificity.
I increasingly believe specificity is one of television’s greatest luxuries.
Walter Presents Understood Something Very Important
And then someone has to help these programmes travel.
This is why Walter Presents deserves enormous credit.
Walter Presents is not actually a production company. It was launched by Channel 4 and Global Series Network as a curated destination for foreign-language drama, with Walter Iuzzolino personally selecting programmes from around the world. From the beginning, the entire idea was based on curation rather than volume: somebody watching international television and saying, essentially, you need to see this.
I love that.
Because there is an enormous difference between an algorithm presenting me with another programme because I watched something vaguely similar last Thursday and a human being saying:
I watched this.
It is from Belgium.
Or Germany.
Or Poland.
Or Argentina.
You probably haven’t heard of it.
But trust me.
That is almost an old-fashioned relationship between curator and audience.
And without services like Walter Presents, how many extraordinary European dramas would have remained inside their national borders?
It gave British viewers permission to stop worrying about subtitles.
More importantly, it helped normalise the idea that a programme did not have to be remade in English before we were capable of understanding it.
That may be one of its greatest contributions.
Please Don’t Remake Everything
There is something slightly depressing about discovering a brilliant European series and immediately learning that somebody has bought the rights to make an English-language version.
Why?
The original is already there.
The bridge is already in Malmö and Copenhagen.
Saga Norén already exists.
The language exists.
The cultural tensions exist.
The geography exists.
The awkwardness exists.
That does not mean adaptations should never happen. Some have been excellent.
But translation should not automatically mean replacement.
Sometimes subtitles are all that is required.
Walter Presents recognised that.
So does MHz Choice, which has built a service around international television presented in its language of origin, carrying drama from countries including France, Germany, Finland, Denmark, Sweden and Italy.
There is something almost radical now about simply saying:
Keep it as it is. We will come to you.
Acorn TV Built Another Kind of Bridge
Acorn TV occupies a slightly different space.
It began with a strong identity around British and international television and today combines acquisitions with originals and exclusives from Britain, Ireland, Australia and elsewhere. Its current catalogue includes programmes such as The Gone, Hidden Assets, Dalgliesh, The Chelsea Detective, Recipes for Love & Murder, My Life Is Murder and Mystery Road.
Again, look at those places.
Ireland.
New Zealand.
Australia.
Britain.
South Africa.
Small towns.
Coastlines.
Communities.
Regional detectives.
People with ordinary kitchens.
Acorn seems to understand that audiences who love this kind of television are not asking for everything to look the same.
Quite the opposite.
We are watching because we want somewhere different.
Scandinavia Built an Entire Production Culture Around Trusting Its Own Voice
And then there are the production companies themselves.
Sweden’s Filmlance International is a wonderful example.
It has been producing television since 1988 and its catalogue includes Beck, The Sandhamn Murders, Caliphate and, crucially, The Bridge. The original Bron/Broen was produced by Filmlance and Denmark’s Nimbus Film, with broadcasters and co-production partners across Scandinavia and Germany.
The Bridge travelled around the world.
It did not do that by trying to disguise where it came from.
It did the opposite.
It put an actual bridge between Denmark and Sweden at the centre of the story.
Two countries.
Two languages.
Two police systems.
Two cultures.
Even the personality differences become part of it.
The local element was not something the production had to overcome.
The local element was the concept.
That is the lesson.
Miso Film and the Confidence of Danish Crime Drama
Denmark’s Miso Film belongs in this conversation too.
Founded in Copenhagen, it produced the original Danish Those Who Kill and continues to make the later Those Who Kill series in Danish.
What I admire about productions like these is their confidence.
They do not appear to be constantly asking whether somebody in Los Angeles will understand them.
They trust the story first.
And ironically, that is exactly what makes them travel.
Once television becomes culturally neutral in the hope of appealing to everyone, it can start belonging to nobody.
Australia May Understand This Better Than Almost Anyone
Australia deserves an enormous amount of credit here.
Australian crime drama has something that cannot be manufactured in a studio: distance.
Real distance.
Heat.
Dust.
Enormous skies.
Communities separated by hundreds of kilometres.
Indigenous history.
Cities that do not need to pretend to be New York.
Land that carries memory.
And there are independent producers protecting exactly that character.
Bunya Productions is one of the most important examples.
Its television work includes the Mystery Road franchise and True Colours. The latter was set partly in a remote Indigenous community and included the Arrernte language. Bunya’s Mystery Road productions have also collected major Australian television awards while remaining unmistakably Australian.
Mystery Road could not simply be relocated.
Take away the land and you take away part of the story.
That is what good location-based drama understands.
Goalpost Pictures and Black Snow
Then there is Goalpost Pictures, another Australian independent company.
Goalpost describes its work as creating Australian stories with distinctive creative voices, and it is the production company behind Black Snow.
Again, Black Snow works because it belongs where it is.
The landscape, cultural history, community and passage of time are embedded in the crime.
Move that story into some anonymous glossy city and something fundamental disappears.
Not the plot.
Something more important.
Its identity.
Even Secret City Wasn’t Trying to Be Washington
This is one of the things I loved about Secret City.
It is political.
It has government buildings, intelligence, power, journalists and international tension.
It would have been very easy to make Australian politics look like a cheaper version of an American political thriller.
Instead, Secret City remained Canberra.
The architecture feels different.
The light feels different.
The political culture feels different.
Anna Torv’s Harriet Dunkley feels Australian.
Matchbox Pictures produced the series with Foxtel, using Canberra itself as part of the political world rather than disguising it as somewhere supposedly more important.
That confidence is everything.
Small Does Not Mean Cheap
This is perhaps the misconception that bothers me most.
When we say independent, regional or small production company, people sometimes hear lower quality.
Why?
Quality is not the same thing as gloss.
Money can buy enormous sets.
It can buy visual effects.
It can buy famous actors.
It can buy hundreds of extras and close roads for three days.
What it cannot automatically buy is observation.
A writer knowing how people in a particular town speak.
A director recognising the importance of a bus stop.
A production designer understanding that the kitchen should not be redesigned because the wallpaper happens to be unfashionable.
A casting director choosing a face because it belongs in the story rather than because it photographs beautifully on a billboard.
That is production value too.
Perhaps we need a better definition of the term.
And Yes, We Still Need the Giants
None of this happens in isolation.
The BBC matters enormously.
Channel 4 matters.
S4C matters.
SVT in Sweden, DR in Denmark, NRK in Norway and Yle in Finland matter.
ABC and SBS in Australia matter.
Public broadcasters in particular have historically created spaces where programmes can exist for reasons other than simply becoming the largest possible global hit.
They commission.
They finance.
They take risks.
They work with independent producers.
And then distributors and curators help the finished work cross borders.
S4C is an especially clear example: it explicitly describes the independent Welsh production sector as central to the service it provides.
So perhaps we should stop thinking of television success as the work of one company.
The best international drama often comes from an ecosystem.
A local writer.
A small production company.
A regional funding body.
A national broadcaster.
A co-production partner.
An international distributor.
A curator like Walter Presents.
A streamer like Acorn.
And finally, us.
The audience willing to read the subtitles.
The World Does Not Need Another Generic City
This is ultimately what I want these companies to protect.
Difference.
I do not want Stockholm to look like Chicago.
I do not want Copenhagen to look like New York.
I do not want Genoa polished until I can no longer recognise the caruggi.
I do not want North Wales lit as though the sun has suddenly relocated there permanently.
I do not want an Australian outback town cleaned up for an international audience.
And I certainly do not want everybody speaking English simply because somebody has decided subtitles are an inconvenience.
Show me the rain.
Show me the ugly municipal building.
Show me the old sofa.
Show me the chipped coffee cup in the police station.
Show me the narrow street where two cars cannot pass.
Show me the woman who looks like somebody I might actually work with.
Show me the detective who bought their coat three winters ago.
Show me somewhere.
Because somewhere is always more interesting than nowhere.
In Praise of the Indies
Perhaps this is why I will always have a soft spot for independent production companies.
They can be brave in a very particular way.
Not necessarily through explosions, enormous budgets or technical ambition.
Sometimes their bravery is simply refusing to remove the thing that makes a story strange, regional or specific.
Keeping the language.
Keeping the landscape.
Keeping the silence.
Keeping the imperfect face.
Trusting six episodes instead of stretching the story to ten.
Trusting an actor instead of explaining every emotion.
Trusting viewers to work things out.
And trusting that somebody sitting thousands of kilometres away might actually want to experience another culture rather than watch it transformed into their own.
Walter Presents helps us find these stories.
Acorn gives many of them another home.
Broadcasters such as the BBC, Channel 4, S4C, DR, SVT, ABC and SBS give them room to exist.
And companies such as Severn Screen, Filmlance, Miso Film, Bunya and Goalpost prove again and again that a production does not need to look American to look expensive, intelligent or world-class.
Quite often, the opposite is true.
The moment television stops trying to look international is often the moment it finally becomes worth watching internationally.
Please keep the rain. Keep the accents. Keep the subtitles. Keep the old kitchens and the empty roads.
We already know what America looks like.
Show us where you are.