Besides the money and production values and overabundance of American programming anyway, one thing I noticed about Australian and European TV shows is that there were a lot more mini-series, or series that had relatively few episodes. So the stories were often better, but the American TV system, which depends on long-running shows and predictibility (at any rate it did much more 15 years ago) wasn’t set up to handle them. I figured that American TV producers would see that as a big hassle and simply not want to deal with it.
In big cities, however, cable carries will often have 2-3 “foreign channels” where you can watch different things; in San Jose, I could watch 2 hours of Indian music videos, followed by Russian programming, with the Turkish news afterwards.
Ally McBeale, Friends, Sex in the City, E.R., and 24 have all been pretty successful in Japan. I couldn’t swear that all have been broadcast on Japanese TV, but I know you can rent episodes at the video store.
As for why there aren’t many Japanese TV shows broadcast in the US, I don’t think there are a lot that would interest American viewers. There are hardly any Japanese sitcoms. The light entertainment niche is mostly filled by talk shows, trivia programs, game shows, and musical variety/sketch comedy programs. To “get” most of these you’d need to know the TV shows/movies/pop culture trends being spoofed and be able to recognize the celebrity guests. Iron Chef is a notable exception, but with Iron Chef the competition is exciting, colorful, and easy to understand, and recognizing the celebrity guest judges isn’t really important. (Japanese people have told me they usually have no idea who the bimbo actresses on Iron Chef are either!)
Japanese dramas tend to be kind of cheap looking compared to American shows. The plots are also often of the sort Americans would associate with soap operas or made-for-TV movies rather than serious nighttime dramas. Nurse falls in love with photographer who is going blind, that sort of thing. And as dangermom mentioned, these series are generally designed to run for, at most, a season. They’d have to catch on pretty quickly in order to find an audience.
Samurai dramas might fare better since they’d at least have novelty appeal, but again, the production quality probably wouldn’t seem very good to Americans. The US spends a lot more money on its TV programs, and it shows.
They show this sort of thing on…oh gosh, I forget what it’s called, but there’s a station in San Francisco that rotates between various Asian languages and often has samurai dramas. Sometimes they even have English subtitles. I used to love that channel - it’s where I first saw Iron Chef, about ten years ago now. It was subtitled instead of dubbed. They have Indian music videos (love!) and Persian soaps, too.
Watching TV in Britain astounded me with how much freaking Springer was on. Springer would be on on one station and in the next time block, it’d be on again, on another station! It’s amazing British people can take Americans seriously at all with that much Springer.
I watched some dubbed TV in France and hated it. Okay, the fact that I speak zero French could have contributed, but when you change the voices, you lose the characters’ personalities, imo. But the French people I talked to about it shrugged and said they like it better that way, I honestly have trouble understanding. (In the US, foreign movies - and yes, we do watch foreign movies! - are always subtitled. Dubbed movies are a source of comedy.)
Was it a “public access” type of channel? There was one of those stations on MediaOne cable in Atlanta a few years back… they rotated between various types of Asian progamming (mostly Korean) and Indian.
I used to watch those Indian shows every time they’d come on; they were fascinating. It was impossible to tell if the shows were filmed in 1976 or 1996. I also got a kick out of how every show was apparently required to have a “the entire village comes out to dance” scene that appeared to be choreographed by the same person that did the Love Is A Battlefield video.
In Germany all successful US series are imported - and not only those but on the for-profit stations also a lot of awful swill. The same goes for movies.
Everything is dubbed - subtitling is considered much inferior (and cheap). I really cannot understand the disdain in which dubbing seems to be held in the US - perhaps the explanation may be that the quality of dubbing in the US is really that awful because the market is so small that the expertise for high-quality dubbing could not evolve, and dubbing has to be done on the cheap because there is much less money in it? Dubbing for the German market is done by long-established, experienced companies and by voice actors who often also are major screen actors. A given actor is almost always dubbed by the same voice actor (John Wayne’s voice in German was definitely more ‘manly’ ). So the voices do have their characters; they are just different ones. Lip-synchronicity is not an issue because we are conditioned not to expect it (over/underruns in the length of a dialogue line are avoided by fine-tuning the text).
BTW there is a notable traffic in the other direction; it’s just well hidden. Good European movies mostly get remade in the US, transposed to US characters/settings.
This is what drives me crazy about dubbed movies and shows. A lot of that might be due to kung-fu movies of the 1970s, which were indeed poorly dubbed. In fact, many American stand-up comedians have routines about those movies, so they’re so bad that they’ve become cultural icons (or anti-icons, as it were).
I think, though, that I’d prefer to watch a movie subtitled regardless. I want to hear the film in its native language. I don’t want to hear anyone but Audrey Tautou try to be Amélié, for instance.
Really? You didn’t find their dubbing to be abnormally better than dubbings with other languages? To me, French dubbing always sounds like the original actors redid their parts themselves.
By an amazing coinkydink, I’m currently reading Why Do People Hate America?, specifically the part on chapter 4 about the one-way flow of American media/movies/shows to the rest of the nation, which touches on everything mentioned in this thread so far.
Anyway, another unintended side effect of this lopsided production value system is that the higher production values ends up making the locals (especially the young) less interested in their own productions as well – it’s hard to sustain audience interest on a small(er)-budget local show if they’ve become accustomed to weekly multi-million-dollar programs from the States. That, in turn, leads to declining interest and/or a loss of traditional entertainment and cultural identity.
Not to get Great Debates in CF, but if this kind of stuff interest you, definitely get a copy of Why Do People Hate America? It’s an in-depth eye-opener for Americans who want to see how the rest of the world sees us.
Probably something like that. The arthouse crowd expects subtitles. Dubbing is associated with cheesy foreign martial arts flicks and monster movies, or kiddie fare. The quality of the vocal talent is often pretty bad.
I think US audiences may be conditioned to expect perfect synchronization, not just because we see so little dubbed foreign fare but because Hollywood places much greater emphasis on capturing dialogue live on the set in the first place. When watching European movies I can often tell that a lot of the original language dialogue was re-recorded in a studio later and dubbed back in. Hollywood likes to avoid this technique, even though (or perhaps because!) it’s much easier and cheaper than keeping the set quiet and boom mics over all the actors’ heads.
As you say, mostly, but not entirely, so it’s still a factor.
I’m sure that there’s a range of production values in all countries. There certainly is here in Australia. I’ve also watched television programmes in all sorts of overseas countries (USA, UK, France, Canada, Thailand, Japan, Russia etc) and you can see very well-produced and very badly-produced programmes in all of them.
I live close enough to the Canadian border to get both major Canadian English-language networks (CBC and CTV). I watch both of them regularly.
We often watch Canadian news, just to get the different perspective. The Canadian Olympic coverage beats the pants off of NBC. Plus, the Canadian dramas are interesting to watch in their own right… they are superficially similar to American dramas, but with just enough differences to make you realize that you are watching a different culture.
Some of the programs are good enough that they should have a strong American following. Royal Canadian Air Farce. Rick Mercer Interviews Americans. North of 60. Good stuff.
Well, in no way did it look like the original actors did their parts that I saw (I didn’t watch a lot, since I don’t speak French and found it pretty boring), but I don’t have a lot of experience with dubbed movies in general, so I am willing to believe that there are other places with even worse dubbing. Yikes.
). So the voices do have their characters; they are just different ones. Lip-synchronicity is not an issue because we are conditioned not to expect it (over/underruns in the length of a dialogue line are avoided by fine-tuning the text).