The Simon Cowell-ing of America

For the Anglo-American “special relationship,” this has been a summer of discontent. President Obama’s harsh criticism of an oil company he pointedly called “British Petroleum” — though it changed its name to BP almost a decade ago — triggered outrage in certain quarters of London, with one top Conservative calling the president’s remarks “xenophobic” and “despicable.” Add to that differences over foreign and economic policies, and you’ve got what experts say are significant strains in the alliance.

But though Washington and Whitehall might be going through an awkward patch, in another sphere their respective countries have never been closer. In terms of media and entertainment, America hasn’t felt this thoroughly permeated by products, characters, ideas and modes of behavior that originated across the Atlantic since the British Invasion of the 1960s. In short, we’re witnessing a distinctly British moment in American culture.

This isn’t the tea-drinking nation of stiff upper-lips that many Americans may still have in mind, though. Rather, it’s the confrontational, outrageous and often downright rude modern Britain of today. In short, it’s the country not of Prince Charles, but of Russell Brand, Sacha Baron Cohen and Simon Cowell.

As the star of the top-rated show on U.S. television every year for the last six, “American Idol” — a spinoff, of course, of a British original — Cowell has brandished his accent like a weapon. Meanwhile, TV’s most ubiquitous offering, “The Office” — you can currently catch it on NBC, TBS and Fox — likewise originated across the pond. Critical darling “Mad Men” now features a prominent British character who’s proving himself almost as adept at drinking and shagging his way through 1960s Manhattan as his American colleagues. And CNN is reportedly set to hand over its prime-time interview show to another Englishman, Piers Morgan. The prospective new host’s dream guest, he recently revealed? Cowell, of course.

Michael Hirschorn, the former VH1 producer — he created “I Love the ‘80s” — who now runs his own production company, Ish Entertainment, notes that American television has become far more comfortable with British characters and personalities in recent years. “As a producer, we’d always been warned never to have English people on our shows, because no one would understand what they’re saying,” Hirschorn said in an interview. That’s changed, he said, thanks to an increasing sophistication among both the public and the networks.

It’s not just TV. One of the most influential online news ventures of the new century, Gawker Media, is the brainchild of native Englishman Nick Denton. The Daily Beast, another high-profile new-media outlet (I write for it semi-regularly) is the latest project of transplanted Brit Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. And the men’s magazine Maxim — which sells more copies in the U.S. than GQ, Esquire and Details combined — was created by British magazine entrepreneur Felix Dennis.

But it’s not simply that there’s a lot of British stuff floating around out there. Rather, in many of these cases, what’s been imported into American culture is a particular British sensibility — and one that’s almost the polar opposite of the reserved, formal Englishman who still pops up in some American stereotypes. That sensibility might be described as an eagerness to contravene traditional notions of fair play, dignity or politeness, in making a bald, sometimes ruthless, play for commercial or popular success, or simply for notoriety. It’s far more comfortable than are most Americans with overt confrontation, sensationalism, outrageousness and pointed sarcasm. And it’s less fastidious about distinctions between high and low culture.

“In England, breaking boundaries or shocking people is an obligation,” said Gabe Doppelt, the former editor in chief of Mademoiselle, who’s now the West Coast bureau chief of the Daily Beast, and who launched her career in London. “Go back to Chaucer. It’s some of the most shocking stuff I’ve ever read.”

Traditionally, American entertainment personalities have been expected to maintain at least a modicum of geniality — niceness, even — the better to appeal to a mass audience. Think Johnny Carson or Pat Boone; even David Letterman’s appeal remains rooted in part in his aw-shucks Midwestern charm. Almost no U.S. TV host has dared to be as outright mean as Cowell — whose final season on “Idol” ended in May — when he humiliates talentless contestants. There’s a particularly English quality to this clever cruelty: Cowell’s intricately formulated insults — “there are only so many words I can drag out of my vocabulary to say how awful that was” — directly recall, for British viewers, the elegant put-downs of the English private school teacher taking pleasure in humiliating a struggling student.

That might describe Denton’s approach to Gawker. A 2007 New York magazine feature story about Gawker recounted how, according to a post on the site, Denton once “harangued Gawker’s editors about being too mean” in their writing, then a few minutes later “began suggesting ideas for posts, like ‘Who’s shorter in real life than you’d think they’d be? Who has dandruff?’” The snark on which Gawker built its name has antecedents in Manhattan’s arch media culture, but as New York magazine saw it, Gawker’s ad hominem attacks and snotty humor outstrip even Spy magazine’s.

Morgan’s Englishness, likewise, isn’t incidental to his success. He wants to interview Cowell, he told a reporter, because during an earlier sit-down in Britain, which he called “Round One,” Morgan “nearly took him down, made him cry.” Similarly, Hirschorn points to Martin Bashir, the British TV correspondent who succeeded where the American media had failed in exposing the extent of Michael Jackson’s weirdness, thanks to a no-holds-barred 2003 interview so disastrous for the King of Pop — this was where he admitted to inviting children into his bed — that his manager later said it triggered the dependence on painkillers that led to the singer’s death.

Morgan and Bashir’s interview-as-combat approach to TV journalism isn’t unusual in Britain — in the political realm, the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman has made a career of it. But in the U.S., where the late Tim Russert was lionized for having the temerity simply to point out to his interviewees what they’d previously said on the subject under discussion, it would until recently have been seen as overly aggressive, or worse, as having an undisguised point of view — the cardinal sin of mainstream American journalism.

Even that difference is breaking down, though. In other words, America’s journalism culture is becoming more like Britain’s, where “objectivity” has never played as prominent a role, and where papers have long openly put both their news and opinion pages in the service of particular political or policy agendas.

Sir Harold Evans, the veteran British journalist who has lived in the U.S. since 1984 (and who’s married to Brown), noted that the famed campaign he led as editor of the Sunday Times in the 1960s to win compensation for the victims of thalidomide would have been far harder here thanks to the strictures of what he called the “he-said she-said doctrine,” which he believes created a “timidity and enfeeblement” in American papers. “That has now been weakened by the infiltration of a willingness to suggest that somebody’s lying,” he said.

Also commonplace in Britain are figures, like Morgan, who can move seamlessly between appearing on game shows and interviewing leading politicians, without worrying about the kind of high/low-culture distinctions that here make it hard to imagine, say, “Bachelorette” host Chris Harrison sitting down to grill Richard Holbrooke on our Afghanistan strategy.

Still, perhaps there’s a final irony here. While Britain’s opinion-filled, confrontational, boisterous sensibility has crossed the Atlantic, the mood back home may be shifting in the opposite direction. David Cameron’s coalition government, in power since May, has surprised many by maintaining, for the most part, an outward spirit of harmony and decorum that’s hardly in keeping with the country’s tradition of vituperative political discourse. As America learns to be rude, are the British at last discovering the virtues of niceness?

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