As TV Lists, Britannia Sails

This TV season, you can't throw a brick in the prime-time landscape without hitting a British actor.

Nearly one-third of the new scripted series on the broadcast networks' prime-time slates are led by actors from the United Kingdom, including three of NBC's four new fall series: "Life," starring Londoner Damian Lewis as a Los Angeles police detective; "Journeyman," starring Scotsman Kevin McKidd as a time-traveling journalist; and a remake of "Bionic Woman," this time starring Middlesex native Michelle Ryan as the lab-enhanced uber-chick.

And this trend is not unique to NBC. More than a dozen other U.K.-rooted actors are coming to prime time, including Fox's Lena Headey; CBS's Lloyd Owen and Jack Davenport; and ABC's Frances O'Connor, Anna Friel, Paul Blackthorne and Jonny Lee Miller.

"Everybody's going!" gushed Sophia Myles -- her bags packed and waiting for her work visa to turn up -- recently to an Associated Press reporter in London. Myles (she was Isolde in the 2006 flick "Tristan and Isolde") plays reporter Beth Turner on CBS's new vampire private-eye drama, "Moonlight."

Why do the broadcast networks suddenly crave Brits? Because they're better trained, more open to bouncing back and forth between film and TV, can be had for less than an American actor with the same amount of experience (although that will end as of, oh, now), and any actor who's been around the track a few times and therefore has gobs of acting experience in the U.K. still passes the all-important, Broadcast TV Fresh-Face test stateside.

You know, like Hugh Laurie, star of Fox's "House."

"There are some pretty amazing people who nobody's heard of in America, great talent, out there waiting for someone [in the United States] to 'discover,' " said former BBC executive Jane Root, who now runs Discovery Channel.

"That's what Hugh Laurie told people -- you can find someone who has enormous experience and yet they feel like completely fresh people."

British actors say they're attracted by the ticket to Hollywood and -- they insisted when asked at the July TV critics' press tour -- great scripts. Which came as a total surprise to the critics, who'd asked the question and who are fairly dismissive of this year's batch of new series.

"I've had a lot of meetings with [British actors] who come in and say, 'I want the Hugh Laurie career' now," Fox network casting chief Marcia Shulman says.

"They love the role, they love that he's fooling everyone in America -- because he's a Brit and speaks with a perfect American accent and he's a comic, doing an incredible role, and doing an incredible job in that role."

Most fingers point to Laurie -- best known early in his career as one of the "Black Adder" screwballs and for playing P.G. Wodehouse's bumbling Bertie Wooster to Stephen Fry's brainiac butler Jeeves -- for triggering this rush to sign British actors to lead roles in U.S. broadcast series. Imitation being the sincerest form of television, so they say.