As a Brit living in America, I have to say that I think in a lot of ways the British TV system leads to better quality shows. Most shows on British TV have short runs (this could be any number of episodes from 6 to 12), and new episodes are shown either once or twice a year. (Sometimes they'll bring a show back at the same time every year; sometimes they'll run new episodes of a show towards the beginning and end of the year - it varies from channel to channel.)
I think this works best with sitcoms - if you think about the best British sitcoms over the years (Fawlty Towers, Absolutely Fabulous, The Young Ones, Father Ted etc.), most of them had a very small total number of episodes compared with long-running American sitcoms. This helps to maintain the quality largely, I think, because in most sitcoms the 'situation' is often exhausted after a few years - short runs mean that the writers don't have to mark time and do filler episodes (at least, not as much as in American shows), and the writers can also take their time to develop their good ideas instead of getting burned out by writing 22 episodes a year. (Of course, American TV came up with the ideas of having sitcoms written by committees of writers - which is still a largely unknown concept in British TV - to make sure that they could churn out those 22 episodes.)
Also, on British TV it's fairly rare for a show to be yanked off the air after just a few episodes. Shows usually do get to complete their initial run, though if something does really badly, they will often switch it to a bad time slot (usually late at night or at about 6pm on Sunday when nobody's watching) instead.
Though ABC's experiment with a short run for 'Kingdom Hospital' seems to have been a failure, I hope that US TV execs move more towards shorter, 12 or 13-episode seasons, let shows complete their initial runs, and move towards modifying the 22-episode format. I think that shows would get burned out a lot later on in their runs if the writers had to produce a smaller number of episodes.
Anyway, I know this is largely OT to the topic of this thread, so I'll stop now...