Watching the Netflix original Happy Valley over the last few days—though it was actually made by the BBC— it struck me more forcibly than ever before how artificial the American crime shows are compared to their British counterparts. Not that the British shows don’t have their share of foolishness—far too many stern strutting anguished people for what still is a fairly placid culture. They seem almost as suicidal as the Scandinavians at times. But, and here’s the point, they look like real people, not someone recruited into the police force as they step down from the Miss America catwalk. Watch any of the current American cop shows and they are pretty much all Barbie and Ken with attitude andn firepower. Can you imagine a U.S. show with plain, ordinary Sergeant Lewis and his sidekick, a drop-out from seminary who can quote Greek and Latin tags, showing up on ABC or Fox? And what about Hetty Wainthropp Investigates? You’ve probably never even heard of it. If you have, you might want to point out to me that they do in fact show up on American TV, mostly on PBS’s Masterpiece Mystery, Amazon Prime or Netflix. But that’s the point. In the U.K. they hold prime-time attention next to Antiques Roadshow and the sheepdog trials. Here they are just for upper middle-class Anglophiles.

Of course the irony is that the characters in the British shows are actually much more like the people in the U.S. watching these shows than are the mannequins with a few lines who populate CSI. Happy Valley is a prime example. This six-part series set in a small, run-down West Yorkshire town features Sarah Lancashire as the hard-pressed local police sergeant. She lives with her recovering heroin addict sister and is divorced from her husband who could not handle the stress of taking care of their daughter’s child after her suicide. So the good sergeant fights her own anger and depression, takes care of the grandchild, worries about her older son, can’t quite let go of the ex-husband though he has remarried, and shoulders the hunt for kidnappers and cop-murderers at the same time. No wonder she doesn’t look like she just stepped out of the pages of Vogue.

But it’s not all about the clothes. British cop shows feature ordinary-looking people, which is what British (and American cops) look like, and British actors seem to be able to take on shabbier and less glamorous personae than they possess in real life. The result is real drama about real life, not some formula show squeezed in between multiple commercials and always ending with the cavalry arriving just in time to save the day for the good guys.

Back in the old days of Hill Street Blues there was a guy called Buntz, fat, flatulent and coarse, but incorruptible. Now there’s a cop I can believe in!