We're suckers for a British accent : Luther

I well remember a theater director speaking to a group of us (mostly American) students in London many years ago and noting so aptly that Americans are suckers for a British accent - and it's still true, anything in British English seems to us classier, smarter, more literary right from the top. Do we associate British English with classic drama, i.e., Shakespeare? Or is it some weird and deep-seated snobbery and deference, a class deference still deep in our blood or our psyche? Or are plays, movies, TV shows from Britain just plain smarter and better than ours? "Luther" makes an interesting case study. I honestly think that if you took this entire series (I saw only a few of the first episodes) and transposed it into an American setting it would be just another one of the many police procedurals, replete with all the cliches: the cop who's smarter than everyone else but can't stay out of trouble, has major issues in his family life, and plays by his own rules (the eponymous Luther), the younger assistant who specializes in getting info through technology and the Internet, the tough as nails supervisor (in this case, a woman) who actually likes the main cop but can't show it, the sexy but beleaguered wife. And so on. It's not that Luther is a bad cop show - it's just that there's little special about it, other than its setting. Granted, these are not the posh London Oxbridgian accents that we hear on PBS - these are (I think) East End accents that, to be honest, are extremely hard for my American ear to decode, especially in that the characters often talk in conspiratorial whispers. One strength is Idris Elba, best known as Stringer Bell, my personal fave character on The Wire - here in his native British, and he's a compelling actor, but not enough to carry the show. One weakness is that instead of showing police life as it really is (which The Wire did so commendably), this show is drawn, like Dexter to a degree, to cases so lurid and weird and improbable it's obvious they're cooked up by the over-active mind of a screenwriter and not by anyone with more than a passing interest in reality - in other words, if you can accept a London police station where, week after week, they're dealing with an upper-class patricide, a serial cop killer crazed by military service, a vampirish madman who abducts women and scrawls on walls in human blood, leaving the most ridiculous possible trail of clues - that this series is for you. I hope to see Elba in many other shows, but not this one.