C4's new digital channel E4 will launch this January with a glittering line-up of new series of Friends, ER, Sex and the City and The Sopranos.
Also making UK debuts will be the hit US series West Wing, about a caring, liberal president played by Martin Sheen, and hit Australian drama Secret Life of Us.
The new series won't screen on C4 until about six months later.
But an E4 spokesman says the keystone of the new digital channel is that it will double the the amount of programmes featuring new British talent coming out of C4 headquarters in London.
Talents similar to Dom Joly, who will feature on E4 with a new series of Trigger Happy TV, will be nurtured.
There's a plan to launch at least 12 new programmes in 2001, including Chained, a reality TV concept unmissable tv reported recently, Banzai, a Japanese interactive gambling show, and As If, a new teen drama.
The E4 spokesman said the channel would have a great capacity to go deeper on hit C4 reality shows like Big Brother and Shipwrecked, showing events as they happened live and investigating rows and disputes between contestants in much more detail than they could on C4.
E4 would be 'keeping to C4 values, but appealing to multi-channel audiences, who are probably slightly more permissive. It's likely to be a little bit more experimental than C4.'
He added that while many E4 shows would migrate to C4, the channel wasn't 'a nursery slope' for its terrestrial sister channel.
E4 will be available initially on Sky Digital, ONdigital, Telewest and NTL providers.