If an American needs any further excuse to sit down and watch a British drama, Mobile is it. Mobile will convince you.

A seeming madman starts blowing up cellphone towers all over England and shooting people in cold blood simply because they were talking on their mobile phones — messages graffitied nearby proclaim the phones to be the work of the devil.

The four-part series brings together three main interlocking plots. A former telecom engineer with a terminal brain tumor comes under suspicion for the bombings. The plot then turns to two executives, Sir James Corson (Keith Allen) and David West (Michael Kitchen) who take turns trying to ruin each other’s careers. Enter Maurice Stoan (Jamie Draven) a former army sharpshooter who misses out on his chance to become a third generation warrior (the 2003 invasion of Iraq — perfect parallel to modern history) when his wife and child are killed by a hit-and-run driver, sending him home on bereavement leave.

The three plots culminate in the fourth and final episode. It’s explosive. It’s dramatic. It’s got guns, sex and betrayal. You just know some American film company is going to steal the plot and make an awful Hollywood movie out of it.

Before that happens, you need to watch Mobile.

Mobile’s stars — British veterans Kitchen (Foyle’s War) and Allen (BBC America’s Robin Hood) and a younger up and coming Jamie Draven — perform their roles with typical British dramatic perfection. Two female costars may be familiar to Americans — Samantha Bond (Moneypenny in the Pierce Brosnan Bond films), as the wife of the telecom executive and Julie Graham (Bonekickers, At Home with the Braithwaites) as the wife of the engineer.

The 2007 series was a big TV hit in the U.K. but has never been seen publicly in the United States yet. Mobile won a Silver World Medal at the 2008 New York Festivals International Television Broadcasting Awards.

Hugh Laurie, Robbie Coltrane, Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry team with some of the other ingenious comedic Brits in 13 episodes of “Alfresco,” released on DVD recently by Acorn Media.

This hilarious early 80s sketch comedy series gives you a rare glimpse at these four superstars at a young age as they perform SNL-style skits.

The series was released August 26 and features hits on the US, bureaucracy, the Cold War and especially themselves with irreverent references co-written by Laurie and Fry.

It’s Saturday Night Live meets Monty Python, and you’ll love it.

The series runs 315 minutes with a bonus 3-part pilot series.

For us on the other side of the pond, the British comedy Fortysomething plays out like a twisted episode of House in an alternate reality.

It is so refreshing and out and out hilarious to watch Hugh Laurie in his native accent as he plays a bumbling British doctor whose kids are sleeping with each others’ girlfriends as he saunters through thinking he’s losing his mind and hearing people’s thoughts in this sex-charged tale of mid-life crisis and family dynamic.

Laurie plays Paul Slippery, who can’t remember the last time he had sex with his wife (Anna Chancellor), but has to deal with his three sons who try to shag everything in sight.

In the US, this would be an inappropriate premise for television or something you’d see in HBO after Sex and the City and the L Word, but Fortysomething actually makes sex on television tasteful.

You also get to see Hugh Laurie cross dress as a Muslim woman in the fourth episode.

Very simply, Fortysomething is brilliant.

The series runs six episodes, one hour each, on two DVD’s being released by Acorn April 8.

Due out on DVD January 29, Chancer was the British television series that made Clive Owen (Children of Men, Inside Man, Closer, King Arthur) a star.

Chancer, Series 2 is the conclusion to the hit 90s series. Owen plays Derek “Dex” Love. He’s devious, dangerous—and even more determined. Dex, a.k.a. Stephen Crane, gets out of jail and goes to work for his former romantic rival, Piers Garfield-Ward (Simon Shepherd). The two men are both only interested in one thing, the orphaned baby of the women they both had loved. They work together to keep the child away from his megalomeniacal industrialist grandfather (Peter Vaughan).

The series co-stars Louise Lombard (CSI). In a plot packed with double crosses of the heart and the wallet, Chancer propels powerfully toward its surprising, devastating conclusion.

The LA Times: “Owen has aged like a fine wine, and his star quality shines through in this compelling drama series.”
Entertainment Weekly: “Watching Owen in Chancer is like looking at a foal you just know is gonna be a thoroughbred.”
San Francisco Chronicle: “great fun.”

The second series is seven episodes and is almost six hours long.

“I’m not a doctor. I don’t pretend to be. My job is to prevent death.”

Dominic Da Vinci is the controversial coroner in Vancouver, and it’s his job to get to the bottom line of the city’s suspicious deaths. This is a Canadian solution to Law & Order, and it’s incredibly popular, so much so that it’s being made available to a wider American audience on DVD

This is a great series that The New York Times called “unlike anything on television.” Season 2 contains 13 episodes, about 10 hours total on four discs.

If you’re in the mood for something different in the cluttered world of crime drama, try this on for size.