The hubs and I started watching Luther for a couple of reasons. First, our younger son had recommended it, and second, it starred Idris Elba whom I’d come to respect for his work in The Wire, one of my all-time favorite shows. We’ve now watched the entire first season of Luther, and while it’s well done with a fascinating premise (detective establishes unwilling connection with woman he knows to be a psychopath), it’s also a major downer. In each episode the main character, John Luther, seems to become more obsessed with his own personal demons and seems closer to unraveling.

This places Luther squarely in the ranks of other BBC series that seem to specialize in bumming out the audience: Wallender and Torchwood are others in the same category. And I should point out, I’ve stopped watching both Wallender and Torchwood for that very reason. I don’t mind a dark point of view, but I’m not particularly into bleak.

But you might ask why, in that case, I’m so fond of The Wire, one of the bleakest series ever produced on American TV, and why I’m equally fond of Treme, which is produced by the same people. The reason, I think, is that they’re American bleak, and American darkness has always been leavened with black comedy.

Treme, which takes place in post-Katrina New Orleans, is full of bitter, frustrating moments (one of the characters commits suicide at the end of the first season), but it’s also full of weirdly joyful ones. Steve Zahn plays a wacky but ultimately endearing musician who’s continually seesawing between the ridiculous and the sublime. The great Wendell Pierce is a struggling trombone player who alternates between financial problems and faintly hilarious predicaments, including a poker game with some legendary New Orleans musicians (Irma Thomas cleans his clock). And the other characters drift in and out of bad times and good times (with the exception of the wonderful Khandi Alexander, whose life seems to be one disaster after another).

The dark series on the BBC don’t really have that alternation. Once it’s dark in Luther, it stays dark, and you’re not going to see Idris Elba smile (a real waste if you ask me). Frankly, I get sort of tired of that approach. If I know a show is going to end with a miserable resolution and that a character I’m supposed to like is going to suffer endlessly, I’m not going to watch it with anything like enthusiasm. After a while, I got tired of Torchwood’s tendency to kill off its characters and to end every episode with misery.

I’ve already written about the contrast between Kurt Wallender and Raylan Givens on Justified, and I stand by my assessment that Raylan is a more interesting character. But now I think I’d expand that to say that I prefer American darkness to the European kind. At least with dark American series, you know there will be some variety rather than unrelieved black.

At the end of the first season of Treme, the characters have a panoply of reasons to feel like crap—they’ve lost family and friends, their livelihoods are in serious jeopardy, and it’s not at all clear that the city will be able to recover. But the final episode of the season includes a jazz funeral that ends with the traditional dance back from the cemetery. And the characters, even those with every reason to be heartbroken, dance. Bless ‘em.