This TV season, you can't throw a brick in the prime-time landscape without hitting a British actor.

Nearly one-third of the new scripted series on the broadcast networks' prime-time slates are led by actors from the United Kingdom, including three of NBC's four new fall series: "Life," starring Londoner Damian Lewis as a Los Angeles police detective; "Journeyman," starring Scotsman Kevin Mc- Kidd as a time-traveling journalist; and a remake of "Bionic Woman," this time starring Middlesex native Michelle Ryan as the lab-enhanced uber-chick.

And this trend is not unique to NBC. More than a dozen other U.K.-rooted actors are coming to prime time, including Fox's Lena Headey; CBS's Lloyd Owen and Jack Davenport; and ABC's Frances O'Connor, Anna Friel, Paul Blackthorne and Jonny Lee Miller.

"Everybody's going!" gushed Sophia Myles -- her bags packed and waiting for her work visa to turn up -- recently to an Associated Press reporter in London. Myles (she was Isolde in the 2006 flick "Tristan and Isolde") plays reporter Beth Turner on CBS's new vampire private-eye drama, "Moonlight."

Why do the broadcast networks suddenly crave Brits? Because they're better trained, more open to bouncing back and forth between film and TV, can be had for less than an American actor with the same amount of experience, and any actor who's been around the track a few times and therefore has gobs of acting experience in the U.K. still passes the all-important, Broadcast TV Fresh-Face test stateside.

You know, like Hugh Laurie, star of Fox's "House."

"There are some pretty amazing people who nobody's heard of in America, great talent, out there waiting for someone [in the United States] to 'discover,' " said former BBC executive Jane Root, who now runs Discovery Channel. "That's what Hugh Laurie told people -- you can find someone who has enormous experience and yet they feel like completely fresh people."

British actors say they're attracted by the ticket to Hollywood and -- they insisted when asked at the July TV critics' press tour -- great scripts.

"I've had a lot of meetings with [British actors] who come in and say, 'I want the Hugh Laurie career' now," Fox network casting chief Marcia Shulman says. "They love the role, they love that he's fooling everyone in America -- because he's a Brit and speaks with a perfect American accent and he's a comic, doing an incredible role, and doing an incredible job in that role."

Most fingers point to Laurie -- best known early in his career as one of the "Black Adder" screwballs and for playing P.G. Wodehouse's bumbling Bertie Wooster to Stephen Fry's brainiac butler Jeeves -- for triggering this rush to sign British actors to lead roles in U.S. broadcast series. Imitation is the sincerest form of television, so they say.

Since 2004, Laurie has played irascible, unlikable, emotionally damaged Dr. Gregory House, turning that show into the unlikeliest of Fox hits and, in the process, becoming the rumpled middle-aged man whom American women most want to pet, and fix.

Fox credits Shulman for talking them into signing off on casting Laurie, who was then known to the American audience as the father of a mouse in the "Stuart Little" films. That group included Gail Berman, Fox entertainment chief at that time, who once admitted her response to the suggested bit of casting was, in fact: "The father from 'Stuart Little'?!"

"Pound for pound, I would say, 'Yes,' " Shulman said when asked whether British actors were better-trained than Americans. "We have a star culture -- in Europe, it's a profession."

British actors are also far more receptive to the idea of shuttling back and forth between film and TV, says Londoner Paul Lee, who was chief executive of cable network BBC America before being named president of Disney's ABC Family Channel in 2004.

"Britain spends a disproportionate amount, against its economic size, on television. That's not true of movies," Lee said. "Because television is over-invested in the U.K. and movies are underinvested compared with the U.S., U.K. actors actually are more trained, and more comfortable, to bounce between movie and TV than U.S. actors."

"They've done it for years," Lee continued. "Judi Dench has been in hit British half-hour multi-camera sitcoms and movies for a decade or more."

The U.K. actors cast in the new series almost uniformly said the stampede to U.S. broadcast series is entirely a coincidence.

"There isn't a pattern. ... There's not suddenly this season, suddenly some fast-track portal that all these British actors are flying through LAX -- it was purely a coincidental thing," McKidd said.

"I think it's a non-story," Lewis, star of NBC's new cop drama "Life," told TV critics in July, regarding the stream of U.K. actors on new broadcast series.

"It's the center of the global film industry out here, not just the American one, and you've had foreigners infiltrating, I'm afraid, ever since it started a hundred years ago," Lewis said. "It's where you can come and do very good work; it's where the most talented people come and it's where they're rewarded well for what they do, whether you're Brit, French, Swedish, whoever the hell you are, it doesn't matter. And that's why it's exciting to be here and to work here."