From Dallas to Friends, US shows have dominated UK TV for decades – and the special relationship is still going strong
“I’ll be there for you,” they told us, and they weren’t lying. This week marks 25 years since the US sitcom Friends first aired on UK television, although sometimes it seems as if no time has passed at all. Between 1995 and 2004, Friends was such a dominant presence on UK screens that it is difficult to remember what our nights in were like without the old gang. Even now, getting in some hang-time with Ross, Rachel, Chandler, Monica, Joey and Pheebs is as easy as firing up Netflix or switching to Channel 5.
US television has been waging a steady invasion campaign for decades, so while Friends was a turning point, it certainly wasn’t the first American TV show to find a major audience on British screens. In the days of three channels and no streaming, Texas-set soap opera Dallas regularly attracted more than 20 million viewers to the BBC. In 1980, its “Who shot JR?” cliffhanger kept an entire nation in suspense for the eight months between the oil baron’s attempted murder and the big reveal of the culprit. By that point, evidently, UK audiences could wait no longer and the BBC decided to compress the usual two-week delay between US and UK broadcast to just 18 hours.
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