"We Are Obsessed With Wealthy British People Cursing at Middle Class Americans" from Cracked I dropped my cable about six months after American Idol really started to become a big deal, but already everybody knew the name Simon Cowell. Still, you wouldn't think a British man who invited Americans on stage to sing, and then insulted them until they cried and ran away, would completely alter the entertainment landscape. But I returned to television most of a decade later to find that we had gone crazy for sarcastic Brits shouting at common people to clean up their act. There are a dozen of these shows. The first time I saw Gordon Ramsay wheel around on some fresh-out-of-college prep chef and call her a "stupid fat fucking cunt" for burning a scallop, I knew TV had gone to a weird place. TV executives apparently nodded and said, "Yes, we need more of that." So they gave Ramsay six fucking shows. Meanwhile, every competitive reality show needed a snide British judge -- So You Think You Can Dance has one, America's Got Talent has two. Project Runway switched things up with the German Heidi Klum. But even stranger to me are the weird Kitchen Nightmares ripoffs. That's such a bizarrely specific formula to catch on (British person shows up at your place of business and curses at you until you get your books in order). On Bravo you'll find Tabatha's Salon Takeover, which is exactly Kitchen Nightmares, except it takes place in a salon instead of a kitchen. Tabatha is technically from Australia, but it's just Bravo so you take what you can get. On Lifetime they have The Fairy Jobmother, where the cursing British host yells at unemployed Americans until they get off their asses and find work. Seriously, what the fuck? Why are they all British (or pseudobritish)? It's not because we hate foreigners and like to paint them all as dicks -- the cursing Brits are the ones we're rooting for. It's like the United States entered into some bizarre S&M relationship with England. All because we saw one snide British man and said, "Yes, we want more of that, all of the time." It'd be like jumping ahead in time to seven years from now and finding that half of the TV shows feature a guy walking with a limp and a cane, because it turned out that's all we liked about House.
I was a sarcastic dick to people before it was cool... Also if you actually knew anything about the uk, you would realise we hate everyone.
Vast majority of the shows originated in Britain and are run by the same people that started them in Britain.
