@BurningChrome: "Also, 11 days to shoot a 42 minute episode works out at just less than 4 minutes broadcast for each shooting day, that's very low for television."
Yeah, it's very low for television. Russell T. Davies joked that on the first series, they planned the shooting schedule according to normal TV schedules, and found that the real rate was so low, they were losing two days for each day they shot!
He said it was the first programme he'd ever worked on where they'd been two weeks behind schedule at the end of the first week. :-)
British TV has a union deal which starts paying overtime after eight hours of shooting (not including breaks). Note that the production can go on for longer, and the lead actors can agree to work longer as standard. However, UK production companies must provide sufficient time off-set that their actors and crew can do things like, y'know, sleep.
American productions have no such rules. Actors and crew often tell stories of 90 hour weeks and 17 hour days. Or the producer sleeping on the couch in the production office because there's no *time* to go home. Or...
So, broadly, that's the difference. They have a killer schedule to produce those 22 42 minute episodes - and they also get paid a heck of a lot for that killer schedule. Brits seem to prefer a lower rate of pay but a working schedule that allows a life outside the job.