I have this theory that the key distinction between UK and US comedy comes down to the class and social systems each is made within. Thanks to the American Dream, the Americans believe in social mobility, and thus US comedy is more aspirational. In the UK, however, the British know full well that if they're on the lower levels, no matter how hard they work they ain't never getting up to the higher decks, because you need to have an ancestor who invaded with William the Conqueror to get that high. So UK comedy is more resigned in a kind of Albert Camus "Sisyphus getting so resigned to pushing the rock up the hill that he starts to see the bright side of it" way. You Yanks have the inspiring "we're gonna make our dreams come true!" mindset, while we Brits have more of a "yeah, it's probably not gonna happen, but fuck it, gotta laugh, haven't you?" thing going on. (Even Benny Hill is not an exception to this: yeah, sure, hot babes, but who's the guy in the middle we're focussing on? A squat fugly troll chasing them around who usually ends up falling into a puddle or something, his dreams of groping blonde bimbos thwarted by his own ineptitude.)
In it's way, this discussion re: UK vs US Office kinda exemplifies this well; UK Office puts the schlubs up front and centre, because pretty much everyone watching BBC Two on Thursday night or whenever it was on knows full well they ain't winning any beauty pageants and doesn't need to be deluded into thinking the person representing them on the show could. US Office, however, needs to cater to the stereotypical viewer's aforementioned belief that they're a Jim / Pam capable of landing a Vice / Versa, so it hottifies the main cast up a few layers and puts the schlubs firmly at the margins so that everyone watching can pretend they're not actually the Kevin or the Meredith.
(This also explains why Americans who watch it are intractably convinced that the UK Office is unremittingly bleak and dark, whereas the British generally look at it and go "Eh, I've had worse.")
I've long thought the same general thing since I was a kid. For British shows and movies, there's very often just a much more boring and grounded feel to the entire thing than for their American counterparts, at least when it comes to just depicting regular people in day-to-day situations. The people look schlubbier, the interiors are messier and more cramped, the tones are more muted and dull, the attitudes of the people are less energetic etc.
I think that does reflect the cultural dispositions of the people making it and consuming it, although I'd say the British disposition is more of a "not American" disposition, and it's not just something you see on TV. Visit any American city and compare it to visiting almost any European city, and you'll notice it even in the way you interact with low level service workers. Not that European ones are all grouchy, but American shop assistants or wait staff are in general just way more peppy and upbeat than you'll find almost anywhere else.
I think you could have an American and a British person working in the exact same office, and have both watch both versions of The Office, and will each genuinely identify more with their own version of the show because each is closer to how they internally conceive of their own workplace and the people in it.
Agree with this and we Europeans may experience that “peppy and upbeat” shop assistant as irritating and fake due to our different cultural dispositions.
I remember someone (think it might have been John Cleese himself) pointing out that, while there are exceptions, American sit coms tend to end each episode by reestablishing the status quo. Whatever problem drove the comedy can be presumed resolved. Whereas British sit coms tend to end episodes at the moment where everything has become as bad as it can be ("Rat?").
Think this backs up what you're saying about optimism vs resignation.
"Blackadder" illustrates this very well with the social stratification the same no matter the setting (though Blackadder's descendants seen to be downwardly mobile across the generations, but he always will have Baldrick to kick about).
This is true, but (British) comedians tend to be on average less attractive, so also tend to be the ones who are left behind to enjoy the British weather with everyone else.
There's clearly a spectrum here, with Spanish-language weather broadcasts on one end and British comedy shows on the other. The fact that we find the hotness of telenovela actresses jarring enough to be the subject of running jokes on Arrested Development seems to indicate that there is some limit to our dumb preference for hot people. Maybe we'll never make it all the way to Jeremy Clarkson territory, but maybe someday there will be at least more room for normal-ish looking people in American TV.
There have definitely been shows I've tried and quickly abandoned because all the characters are too hot for the roles they are playing. Makes you aware you are watching TV when the waitress looks like she just stepped off a runway in Milan.
The only bone I have to pick with this article is the idea that art is ever anything other than commerce. The Sistine Chapel was a commission, the Taj Mahal exists because a rich guy wanted to pay for it, artists have always had to make money and they frankly used to have less freedom about what needed to be made than they do today. Don't talk your former industry down: TV is still art even if you have to consider commercial aspects.
Also, from someone who used to work in distribution, it is amazing to me how hard production struggles to make things art when all us normies think that people are cynically making things by formula. Directors who think the color of the sky in this scene is "too blue", or that any theater other than the one they premiere in is going to play their movie in a bespoke aspect ratio, or who want to make sure that the color is the same on a white or silver screen so you make two versions, or who go around their original production company to the distributor to get more money for a better head explosion... these were all for movies that got zero awards attention at the end of the year. But the artists still care so much about these tiny details! Even if the corporates shut down some of your more fanciful ideas, you guys still manage to get your way on all sorts of stuff that us normies cannot imagine why you care about it.
This... depends on the director. Hard-ass directors sometimes say "you gotta get all the establishment shots on the same day," because the audience will notice the differences in weather, if you don't. It's subliminal, unconscious, but it's there.
It's also funny to see an entire "we shot this in Ohio" movie, where the end of it has all PA license plates. Sometimes directors screw up the easy stuff, too.
At least you didn't (probably) have to deal with the "Wait! I fixed it!" re-release of CATS (what do you mean you noticed her hand! Judy!).
Cynical isn't always formulaic, either. Germany pays money whenever someone uses a german song in an American production. So the true shekel hunters put in... A Neverending Story. Ca-Ching!
Actually, my husband (who still works in movie localization) worked on Cats. He was practically pulling his hair out because "They still haven't delivered final picture and we're supposed to be shipping the drives on Friday!!!" Cats is actually a perfect example of what I'm talking about- they did reshoots, they kept reworking the CGI, they kept fiddling with it right up until release and had to patch it after because they were so determined to try to salvage a decent movie out of what was frankly a pile of shit. It wasn't bad for lack of *effort*. Those poor CGI artists were working and reworking for weeks and weeks of overtime!
An interesting corollary to this is when super hot people get heaps of praise for going ugly for a role. Really, Charlize, was it so "brave" to put on prosthetics for a few hours a day to do Monster? Hell, I gotta live with being ugly every day and no one thinks twice about it
A good example of this is when I tell myself I want an historical epic to be accurate. "No one had good teeth back then!" And yet any time I've ever seen a show where someone has gross teeth, I'm like "that's disgusting!"
I always thought the Joker having nasty yellow teeth in The Dark Knight was the final, perfect, disgusting detail for that character. Like, of course that guy doesn't practice good dental hygiene. You can practically smell him when he's up in Maggie Gyllenhaal's face.
The latest iteration of this is the ubiquity of very obvious plastic surgery in Hollywood. Clearly bogged actors running around Napoleonic France and $50,000 faces as leftist revolutionaries detract from the verisimilitude.
Okay, but counter-argument: there's clearly room for SOME non-hot people in a cast, because Burn Gorman keeps getting roles. And I'm glad, 'cause he's a good actor... but geez Louise, if looks could kill.
Personally, I'm not even sure if the American Office is the best example of this phenomenon in U.S. television. Even with the point on Jim and Pam, the rest of the cast looks relatively normal. I've often said the appeal of the show is that they look like people who would actually be your coworkers in a standard office.
That said, I'll say that they do glow up Jim and Pam as the show progresses. You def notice Pam start to dress less frumpy and Jim suddenly have perfect hair somewhere around Season 5 or so.
There's always been non-hottie character actors playing secondary roles, but the articles here are specifically about non-hotties getting to move up to leading roles as the faces of mainstream movies and TV shows.
I think standard hot actors in roles may die a death, but not necessarily due to people wanting more normal looking humans on their TVs (although we do, British TV as a whole pretty much proves that, my American friends actually started watching TV again when they came to visit for exactly this reason); I think they'll be replaced by AI, which is why I think they all started getting scared when that fake AI actress was released.
I mean, why pay for a hot human, who wants lots of money for their hotness and special treatment from everyone else; but will eventually eat and/or age themselves into unemployment, so you then have to pay more money to find the next one? AI is cheaper, and although it can't easily replicate an ugly like me, it could replace any top Hollywood person in a second!
That's a good point. When AI people are able to just easily be easy replicas of flawless humans, the value of flawless humans may just drop. In the same way that after cameras were invented, the value of being able to paint a photorealistic portrait dropped massively and more abstract art started to replace it.
One of the obvious reasons the British version of The Office looks more grounded is that Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant wrote a sitcom for Gervais to star in. The producers didn’t face a trade-off between good looks and realism. Brent looks like a podgy git because Gervais was a podgy git.
I don't have numbers to hand, but I feel like the original Office was a hit before the spin-off, unless you redefine "hit" to mean "popular in the US specifically". Certainly it seemed to be one of those shows that everyone was talking about when it first aired in the UK.
As to the general thesis on the tone differences between UK and US TV comedy: I think you're right that the brevity of UK TV series is a factor. 22 episodes a year of Peep Show might be a bit much. And you mentioned Fargo, showing that there is a market for stories about real-looking people in the US, as long as they're not serialised.
I also think it's a certain amount of cultural drift. Britain just doesn't have such a background of movies about gorgeous people to influence its TV shows. The Golden Age of Hollywood made quite a mark, I'd say.
I kind of hope this might be getting tempered a little bit by the universal consumption of extremely shallow social media like Tiktok or Instagram. If you're just a very hot person, you can do very well on these kinds of platforms without even needing a secondary talent. You don't need to run away to Los Angeles and spend all day trying to score auditions and dealing with rejection. You can just stay at home and take pictures or visit places in your city and take pictures or visit exotic locales and take pictures, so the previous pipeline isn't what it used to be.
In addition to that though, the average person is seeing these people so much already that maybe they aren't as starved for it on TV and movies as they used to be. The combo of these two factors may lead to at least a bit of a loosening of the glamour necessary to become an actor.
Reality TV operates the same way. People on dating shows are always conventionally attractive. Even the women who are like "ugh, I'm sooooo fat" are skinnier than roughly 80% of the population. And I'm accounting for the fact that our standard for "fat" is still far healthier than in the 2000s!
I am in my forties, and I was a blond kid from the Midwest. So it gives me no pleasure to say this, but Brad Pitt cannot be an example of attractiveness in 2025. My God, isn't he aged into Social Security by now. Any above-average looking guy in the MLB world pull more tail if you equalize for money and fame. DEBATE ME BROS!
*bros awkwardly walk away to see if there's anything good on tv.*
I do find it weird how often you see the go-to cultural reference of "handsome man" be so stuck in the past with the default choice almost always being guys like Pitt or Clooney who are both now septengenerians. Although that being said I did bring this up with a group of friends recently and we struggled to come up with a good replacement of a male celebrity under 40 who could fill the role today of being someone who meets both of the criteria of being famous enough to be universally known, and also conventionally attractive enough to be considered universally "handsome" (as in, not just attractive in an unconventional way or youthful looking enough to veer more towards "cute").
Most of The best we could come up with were Jason Momoa and Ryan Gosling, both of whom are well past 40 now. We need to pick a new guy for this.
To be fair, I just looked up Pitt's age and he is technically a sexagenarian (the perfect decade in which to be a sex symbol). I think he was so ridiculously good-looking in the 90s that he will always be grandfathered in as an example of a hot guy. The same was probably true of Sean Connery, Paul Newman, and Robert Redford. My go-to hot dudes would be the Chris's: Pratt, Evans, Hemsworth, and Pine (especially those last two). Although they're all in their forties now, yeesh.
Celebrity culture is just plain dead. People don't want to see the latest Katharine Hepburn movie (remember Box Office Poison?). Brad Pitt (or DeCaprio) are some of the last "Celebrity Crushes." -- the people who Make Movies Happen.
Kit Harington is hot, so are other people on that show. He's not a flagpole guy like Momoa though.
Kids today don't know who Brad Pitt or George Clooney are, any more than they'd recognize Robert Redford or Paul Newman. I honestly do not know who now fills the role of "standard male hottie."
He was hot as hell, cool as hell, and tough as hell in Monkey Man. Recommended if you like action flicks. And I believe the other name you're looking for is "Timothy Ski-Chalet."
I have this theory that the key distinction between UK and US comedy comes down to the class and social systems each is made within. Thanks to the American Dream, the Americans believe in social mobility, and thus US comedy is more aspirational. In the UK, however, the British know full well that if they're on the lower levels, no matter how hard they work they ain't never getting up to the higher decks, because you need to have an ancestor who invaded with William the Conqueror to get that high. So UK comedy is more resigned in a kind of Albert Camus "Sisyphus getting so resigned to pushing the rock up the hill that he starts to see the bright side of it" way. You Yanks have the inspiring "we're gonna make our dreams come true!" mindset, while we Brits have more of a "yeah, it's probably not gonna happen, but fuck it, gotta laugh, haven't you?" thing going on. (Even Benny Hill is not an exception to this: yeah, sure, hot babes, but who's the guy in the middle we're focussing on? A squat fugly troll chasing them around who usually ends up falling into a puddle or something, his dreams of groping blonde bimbos thwarted by his own ineptitude.)
In it's way, this discussion re: UK vs US Office kinda exemplifies this well; UK Office puts the schlubs up front and centre, because pretty much everyone watching BBC Two on Thursday night or whenever it was on knows full well they ain't winning any beauty pageants and doesn't need to be deluded into thinking the person representing them on the show could. US Office, however, needs to cater to the stereotypical viewer's aforementioned belief that they're a Jim / Pam capable of landing a Vice / Versa, so it hottifies the main cast up a few layers and puts the schlubs firmly at the margins so that everyone watching can pretend they're not actually the Kevin or the Meredith.
(This also explains why Americans who watch it are intractably convinced that the UK Office is unremittingly bleak and dark, whereas the British generally look at it and go "Eh, I've had worse.")
I've long thought the same general thing since I was a kid. For British shows and movies, there's very often just a much more boring and grounded feel to the entire thing than for their American counterparts, at least when it comes to just depicting regular people in day-to-day situations. The people look schlubbier, the interiors are messier and more cramped, the tones are more muted and dull, the attitudes of the people are less energetic etc.
I think that does reflect the cultural dispositions of the people making it and consuming it, although I'd say the British disposition is more of a "not American" disposition, and it's not just something you see on TV. Visit any American city and compare it to visiting almost any European city, and you'll notice it even in the way you interact with low level service workers. Not that European ones are all grouchy, but American shop assistants or wait staff are in general just way more peppy and upbeat than you'll find almost anywhere else.
I think you could have an American and a British person working in the exact same office, and have both watch both versions of The Office, and will each genuinely identify more with their own version of the show because each is closer to how they internally conceive of their own workplace and the people in it.
Agree with this and we Europeans may experience that “peppy and upbeat” shop assistant as irritating and fake due to our different cultural dispositions.
I remember someone (think it might have been John Cleese himself) pointing out that, while there are exceptions, American sit coms tend to end each episode by reestablishing the status quo. Whatever problem drove the comedy can be presumed resolved. Whereas British sit coms tend to end episodes at the moment where everything has become as bad as it can be ("Rat?").
Think this backs up what you're saying about optimism vs resignation.
"Blackadder" illustrates this very well with the social stratification the same no matter the setting (though Blackadder's descendants seen to be downwardly mobile across the generations, but he always will have Baldrick to kick about).
I always assumed it was just that the most attractive British actors decamp to Hollywood to make more money.
When S2 of Such Brave Girls was coming out one of the creators was still working in retail.
This is true, but (British) comedians tend to be on average less attractive, so also tend to be the ones who are left behind to enjoy the British weather with everyone else.
There's clearly a spectrum here, with Spanish-language weather broadcasts on one end and British comedy shows on the other. The fact that we find the hotness of telenovela actresses jarring enough to be the subject of running jokes on Arrested Development seems to indicate that there is some limit to our dumb preference for hot people. Maybe we'll never make it all the way to Jeremy Clarkson territory, but maybe someday there will be at least more room for normal-ish looking people in American TV.
There have definitely been shows I've tried and quickly abandoned because all the characters are too hot for the roles they are playing. Makes you aware you are watching TV when the waitress looks like she just stepped off a runway in Milan.
The only bone I have to pick with this article is the idea that art is ever anything other than commerce. The Sistine Chapel was a commission, the Taj Mahal exists because a rich guy wanted to pay for it, artists have always had to make money and they frankly used to have less freedom about what needed to be made than they do today. Don't talk your former industry down: TV is still art even if you have to consider commercial aspects.
Also, from someone who used to work in distribution, it is amazing to me how hard production struggles to make things art when all us normies think that people are cynically making things by formula. Directors who think the color of the sky in this scene is "too blue", or that any theater other than the one they premiere in is going to play their movie in a bespoke aspect ratio, or who want to make sure that the color is the same on a white or silver screen so you make two versions, or who go around their original production company to the distributor to get more money for a better head explosion... these were all for movies that got zero awards attention at the end of the year. But the artists still care so much about these tiny details! Even if the corporates shut down some of your more fanciful ideas, you guys still manage to get your way on all sorts of stuff that us normies cannot imagine why you care about it.
This... depends on the director. Hard-ass directors sometimes say "you gotta get all the establishment shots on the same day," because the audience will notice the differences in weather, if you don't. It's subliminal, unconscious, but it's there.
It's also funny to see an entire "we shot this in Ohio" movie, where the end of it has all PA license plates. Sometimes directors screw up the easy stuff, too.
At least you didn't (probably) have to deal with the "Wait! I fixed it!" re-release of CATS (what do you mean you noticed her hand! Judy!).
Cynical isn't always formulaic, either. Germany pays money whenever someone uses a german song in an American production. So the true shekel hunters put in... A Neverending Story. Ca-Ching!
Actually, my husband (who still works in movie localization) worked on Cats. He was practically pulling his hair out because "They still haven't delivered final picture and we're supposed to be shipping the drives on Friday!!!" Cats is actually a perfect example of what I'm talking about- they did reshoots, they kept reworking the CGI, they kept fiddling with it right up until release and had to patch it after because they were so determined to try to salvage a decent movie out of what was frankly a pile of shit. It wasn't bad for lack of *effort*. Those poor CGI artists were working and reworking for weeks and weeks of overtime!
An interesting corollary to this is when super hot people get heaps of praise for going ugly for a role. Really, Charlize, was it so "brave" to put on prosthetics for a few hours a day to do Monster? Hell, I gotta live with being ugly every day and no one thinks twice about it
Ah yes, the perennial Oscar for "Most Attractive Actress Who Agreed To Wear Unflattering Make-Up For A Movie".
A good example of this is when I tell myself I want an historical epic to be accurate. "No one had good teeth back then!" And yet any time I've ever seen a show where someone has gross teeth, I'm like "that's disgusting!"
I always thought the Joker having nasty yellow teeth in The Dark Knight was the final, perfect, disgusting detail for that character. Like, of course that guy doesn't practice good dental hygiene. You can practically smell him when he's up in Maggie Gyllenhaal's face.
They've given Jessie Buckley slightly mangy teeth in Hamnet, and I did find myself looking at them a lot. Can only help her Oscars campaign though!
The latest iteration of this is the ubiquity of very obvious plastic surgery in Hollywood. Clearly bogged actors running around Napoleonic France and $50,000 faces as leftist revolutionaries detract from the verisimilitude.
Okay, but counter-argument: there's clearly room for SOME non-hot people in a cast, because Burn Gorman keeps getting roles. And I'm glad, 'cause he's a good actor... but geez Louise, if looks could kill.
Danny DeVito is a troll, and the hardest working guy in Hollywood*. Yes, he has to work his ass off, because ain't nobody hiring him for his looks.
*slight exaggeration, maybe? He's definitely not sleeping with the producers to get films made.
Maybe they do? He does look unique and distinctive.
You would have loved Charles Bronson.....
You consider him ugly? Really?
Not that. Unique?
Certainly non traditional.
Good actor, which is all that matters.....
My dad resembled him closely when younger, and all my friends thought my dad was cute. (Which made me gag, of course!)
To each their own.
It's all cultural.....
Personally, I'm not even sure if the American Office is the best example of this phenomenon in U.S. television. Even with the point on Jim and Pam, the rest of the cast looks relatively normal. I've often said the appeal of the show is that they look like people who would actually be your coworkers in a standard office.
That said, I'll say that they do glow up Jim and Pam as the show progresses. You def notice Pam start to dress less frumpy and Jim suddenly have perfect hair somewhere around Season 5 or so.
I think they're called "character actors" and they occupy the same role as "black best friend" in 80s movies.
There's always been non-hottie character actors playing secondary roles, but the articles here are specifically about non-hotties getting to move up to leading roles as the faces of mainstream movies and TV shows.
I think standard hot actors in roles may die a death, but not necessarily due to people wanting more normal looking humans on their TVs (although we do, British TV as a whole pretty much proves that, my American friends actually started watching TV again when they came to visit for exactly this reason); I think they'll be replaced by AI, which is why I think they all started getting scared when that fake AI actress was released.
I mean, why pay for a hot human, who wants lots of money for their hotness and special treatment from everyone else; but will eventually eat and/or age themselves into unemployment, so you then have to pay more money to find the next one? AI is cheaper, and although it can't easily replicate an ugly like me, it could replace any top Hollywood person in a second!
That's a good point. When AI people are able to just easily be easy replicas of flawless humans, the value of flawless humans may just drop. In the same way that after cameras were invented, the value of being able to paint a photorealistic portrait dropped massively and more abstract art started to replace it.
One of the obvious reasons the British version of The Office looks more grounded is that Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant wrote a sitcom for Gervais to star in. The producers didn’t face a trade-off between good looks and realism. Brent looks like a podgy git because Gervais was a podgy git.
I don't have numbers to hand, but I feel like the original Office was a hit before the spin-off, unless you redefine "hit" to mean "popular in the US specifically". Certainly it seemed to be one of those shows that everyone was talking about when it first aired in the UK.
As to the general thesis on the tone differences between UK and US TV comedy: I think you're right that the brevity of UK TV series is a factor. 22 episodes a year of Peep Show might be a bit much. And you mentioned Fargo, showing that there is a market for stories about real-looking people in the US, as long as they're not serialised.
I also think it's a certain amount of cultural drift. Britain just doesn't have such a background of movies about gorgeous people to influence its TV shows. The Golden Age of Hollywood made quite a mark, I'd say.
I kind of hope this might be getting tempered a little bit by the universal consumption of extremely shallow social media like Tiktok or Instagram. If you're just a very hot person, you can do very well on these kinds of platforms without even needing a secondary talent. You don't need to run away to Los Angeles and spend all day trying to score auditions and dealing with rejection. You can just stay at home and take pictures or visit places in your city and take pictures or visit exotic locales and take pictures, so the previous pipeline isn't what it used to be.
In addition to that though, the average person is seeing these people so much already that maybe they aren't as starved for it on TV and movies as they used to be. The combo of these two factors may lead to at least a bit of a loosening of the glamour necessary to become an actor.
Reality TV operates the same way. People on dating shows are always conventionally attractive. Even the women who are like "ugh, I'm sooooo fat" are skinnier than roughly 80% of the population. And I'm accounting for the fact that our standard for "fat" is still far healthier than in the 2000s!
Eh, I'd argue it's unhealthier because of how much we overshot the overcorrection.
Generally, yes. I'm mainly referring to reality TV, which has still largely abided by the same rules.
I am in my forties, and I was a blond kid from the Midwest. So it gives me no pleasure to say this, but Brad Pitt cannot be an example of attractiveness in 2025. My God, isn't he aged into Social Security by now. Any above-average looking guy in the MLB world pull more tail if you equalize for money and fame. DEBATE ME BROS!
*bros awkwardly walk away to see if there's anything good on tv.*
*
I do find it weird how often you see the go-to cultural reference of "handsome man" be so stuck in the past with the default choice almost always being guys like Pitt or Clooney who are both now septengenerians. Although that being said I did bring this up with a group of friends recently and we struggled to come up with a good replacement of a male celebrity under 40 who could fill the role today of being someone who meets both of the criteria of being famous enough to be universally known, and also conventionally attractive enough to be considered universally "handsome" (as in, not just attractive in an unconventional way or youthful looking enough to veer more towards "cute").
Most of The best we could come up with were Jason Momoa and Ryan Gosling, both of whom are well past 40 now. We need to pick a new guy for this.
To be fair, I just looked up Pitt's age and he is technically a sexagenarian (the perfect decade in which to be a sex symbol). I think he was so ridiculously good-looking in the 90s that he will always be grandfathered in as an example of a hot guy. The same was probably true of Sean Connery, Paul Newman, and Robert Redford. My go-to hot dudes would be the Chris's: Pratt, Evans, Hemsworth, and Pine (especially those last two). Although they're all in their forties now, yeesh.
Celebrity culture is just plain dead. People don't want to see the latest Katharine Hepburn movie (remember Box Office Poison?). Brad Pitt (or DeCaprio) are some of the last "Celebrity Crushes." -- the people who Make Movies Happen.
Kit Harington is hot, so are other people on that show. He's not a flagpole guy like Momoa though.
Most bros are looking at Angelina Jolie instead of Brad Pitt, so they just say something like "did you say something, bro?".
Kids today don't know who Brad Pitt or George Clooney are, any more than they'd recognize Robert Redford or Paul Newman. I honestly do not know who now fills the role of "standard male hottie."
Timothy Frenchnameguy
Dev Indiannameguy is pretty hot as well
He was hot as hell, cool as hell, and tough as hell in Monkey Man. Recommended if you like action flicks. And I believe the other name you're looking for is "Timothy Ski-Chalet."
In fairness there are actually very hot people, in real life , all the time. A lot fewer as you get older though.
*Sadly hums a minor-key version of that Lion King "Circle of Life" song*