I first caught an episode of the miniseries "Stephen Fry in America" when at my hotel in Auckland, New Zealand. In that particular episode, he was crossing the Deep South in one of those cute rounded English black cabs. When I returned to the U.S., I signed up for a free month's trial of Netflix and I found this miniseries online and just couldn't help myself. I was curious to see America through Stephen Fry's eyes.

In the fourth episode, titled "Mountains and Plains," he visits Glacier National Park (a place I dream of visiting someday) in Montana and speaks to geologist Dan Faber, who says that Americans have a love affair with their national parks. I can't speak for everyone, of course, but I definitely second that. Aside from our ridiculous foods, the thing I'm most proud of is our geography, our landscapes. The United States is just so beautiful, and so varied. It's so big that we have almost every kind of terrain and climate there is, and you can get to almost all of it by car.

Washington State

Jackson Lake, Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming

Williamsburg, Virginia

Shoshone National Forest, Wyoming

White Sands National Monument, New Mexico

Folly Beach, South Carolina

The sheer size of the United States is mentioned several times throughout the miniseries, by Stephen Fry himself whilst driving through Nebraska: "It's hard for someone like me, from a small island, to comprehend the vastness of it. Trains that seem to go on forever, and of course the long roads that are so much part of the almost mythical romance of America." And then again as he leaves Lake Powell in Utah: "Leaving the otherworldly landscape and my gloriously gargantuan houseboat, I realize just how much Americans are used to super sizes in everything. The distances out West are just vast."

Watching this miniseries brought to mind a series of articles from The Atlantic about the United States through non-Americans' eyes. I was really amused by many of the comments, though they made a whole lot of sense to me ... here are some that stood out to me:

"Americans are a lot more religious than I ever assumed from watching American television." 

"Many Indians are very surprised to find out that there are large numbers of Americans who actually love their parents and siblings and wives and children and have normal, healthy relationships with them."  

And this one I'm not sure what to make of:
"A McDonalds in a mall in Beijing or Brasilia is a horror. But go to one for breakfast in Los Angeles and it all kind of works: the design and appearance, the food, the behaviour of the staff. Not a wooden formula but a living culture."

And apparently visitors are shocked that cowboys do not roam the United States like they do (or did) in the movies. Well, visit Montana and Texas and you'll surely see a lot of Stetsons ... not sure if they're real cowboys or they just like wearing the hat.

While the Stephen Fry miniseries was filmed in either 2006 or 2007 (that is before the Great Recession), I think there must be some truth to the idea that the American Dream is still alive, somewhere. In San Francisco, Fry meets up with British expat Jonathan Ive of Apple, who compares the working atmosphere of England to that of the U.S.: "I think that there's just a conspicuous lack of cynicism and skepticism. Ideas are so fragile, aren't they? It's so easy to sort of miss an idea because they can be so quiet, or to snuff an idea out. I think that the sense of, the inquisitiveness, the willingness to try is so important for design, for developing those tentative, fragile ideas into a real product."

I wouldn't agree that the whole of the U.S. is a cradle of creativity -- in fact, I believe that much of New York City is a graveyard to innovation, but it's a nice sentiment that I have to hope is true. I think that the miniseries is probably more enlightening and useful to Americans than it is to non-Americans, who probably don't care as much about the quirky, hidden sites formerly used as a missile launching pad or a Wiccan gathering place. But we have just about everything here, and it's there if only you look for it.