Reflecting on the breakout success of Mackenzie Crook ’s Small Prophets , BBC comedy chief Jon Petrie is pleased that his team failed to land an American co-producer. With nearly eight million views after its first 28 days, Small Prophets is the BBC’s biggest scripted launch of 2026 and one of its biggest of the decade. Petrie acknowledged that funding the quintessentially British show was hard but said his team were “privately worried” about getting an American co-producer in place as they may have intervened on casting and wanted a different name than lead Pearce Quigley . “It would have been hard to get Pearce Quigley in the lead,” he told today’s BBC Comedy Festival of the Detectorists alum.…