 |
| Angelika/Mike Schilli |
|
Currently on TV
Michael When watching TV in the USA, the question arises: cable or satellite dish? After AT&T (which owns the cable) aired TV commercials with funny stories suggesting that satellite dish owners are not very bright, we decided to get cable. With cable, you receive about 60 different channels. However, that's so many that the TV Guide, the weekly television magazine in the USA, is as thick as the phone book of a small German town! In the book Understanding USA, I read that the TV Guide, this completely useless magazine, publishes 12.5 million copies every week and earns $1.17 billion a year from advertising! By the way, "Understanding USA" is a very interesting book. For example, it reveals that Florida is mostly home to people over 60, and in South Texas, hardly anyone goes to college. Or that white men over 50 make up about 10% of the population but account for 33% of all suicides. Or that between 1990 and 1998, the costs for attending college in the USA increased by 54.2%, while during the same period, the prices for televisions fell by 52.2%. Or that 30% of all Black males between 20 and 30 years old in the USA have been in prison at some point. Or that 43 million Americans have no health insurance. Or that New Orleans holds the national record with 37% of its population being overweight. But I digress.
Figure 1 shows the selection of the TV program for a single day from 6:00 PM to midnight -- completely unusable if you don't already know what you want to watch. But luckily, as explained in one of the recent newsletters, we have TiVo, the thinking TV computer that scans through all the channels day and night, records everything its owners like, and always has it ready to play.
This has led to us having no idea anymore about what program runs on which channel, as TiVo just recorded somewhere it at some point. You simply click on the show based on the title in the TiVo list and enjoy it. Of course, no normal person goes through channels 40 and above--that's something only people can do who sit on the couch all day in their underwear, drink "Budweiser" beer, and channel surf with the remote control. I, of course, don't do that.
The TiVo box also has nothing to do all day except search for interesting shows on behalf of its owners, and explores the most absurd channel numbers. This works, as I have written before, by the box learning what its owners like, and it can sometimes happen that the box discovers something its owners would never have found themselves. "Travels with Harry" (Channel 47) is, for example, such a lucky find. Since we like to watch travel magazines like "Back Area Backroads" (about the San Francisco area), the TiVo box thought we might also enjoy "Travels with Harry," a show where a certain Harry Smith travels around small-town America, uncovering traditions and absurdities. And TiVo was right; we now enthusiastically watch the show every week! Another example is "Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends" (Channel 48), where a British reporter from the BBC travels around the world discovering the most eccentric things.
With so many TV offerings, there are also shows for niche groups, like people who paint pictures of moose standing in front of mountains. In illustration 3, you can see Bob Ross who spends hours explaining and demonstrating how to paint such pictures. TiVo now knows that I enjoy watching this kind of nonsense and records it to Angelika's annoyance, even when "Oprah" is on!
Before airing a TV show, the broadcasters always have to display how much sex and violence will be shown. In Figure 4, you can see that "mild violence" (mild violence, haha!), "adult content" (it could be about drugs or something), and "adult language" (someone might say "shit" or "fuck") will be featured. There are also additional categories for nude scenes, which are handled particularly strictly in America. On regular programming you will never — and I mean never — see anyone naked or even half-naked. The scenes are either cut out entirely or blurred at the relevant spots. On pay-TV (that is, the channels you have to pay extra for, like HBO, the American version of "Premiere"), things can get a bit more permissive. There you'll find "brief nudity" (just a vague outline), "full nudity" (you actually see something), and even "strong sexual content." Although in prudish America that doesn’t mean much -- one single evening on RTL in Germany would be nonstop, full-on "strong sexual content."
Furthermore, television here is highly regionalized. Similar to how ARD in Bavaria airs Bavarian programs in the early evening, each city here has its own television programming. So, it can happen that the 10 o'clock news on Channel 5 leads with the story that the city plans to increase the toll on the Bay Bridge by one dollar. When we had only been in San Francisco for a few months, we once made the mistake of buying a television program during one of our trips just past the Golden Gate Bridge -- which turned out to be useless because Tiburon and Sausalito have completely different channel numbers.
In the USA, there are four different time zones: If a nationwide broadcast airs at 8:00 PM (Pacific Time) in San Francisco, it has already aired at 7:00 PM in the Mountain Time Zone (Chicago), at 6:00 PM in the Central Time Zone (Texas), and at 5:00 PM Eastern Time (New York). This leads to conflicts, especially with highly anticipated shows like the finale of "Survivor": Since the shows must air at the local prime time due to high advertising revenue, people in New York already know the outcome three hours earlier.
Regionalism is also reflected in advertising: It can happen that suddenly a Chinese dentist from San Francisco, with an incredible accent, promotes his services. Unlike in Germany, doctors and lawyers here are allowed to advertise like any other company. I regularly roll on the floor laughing when at the end of the "Jang and Associates" dental team commercial, all their staff lines up, and the boss shouts "Jang and Associates!" and they all put on a smile on cue, while his dental team murmurs "We'll take gooood care of ya!" (Figure 5). For the first dental examination, including X-rays and a written cost estimate, these diligent dental entrepreneurs charge only $18 instead of the regular price of $135, as I've learned from their commercial (Figure 6).
Since San Francisco is home to many foreigners whose native language is not necessarily English, television reserves channels for Japanese, Chinese, and Spanish programs. The latter are for Mexicans and have the pleasant feature of broadcasting sports like soccer, which is ignored by regular channels even during the World Cup! However, the "Gooooooool" for every goal takes some getting used to. On the Japanese channel, I once saw an American football player who, in a commercial, promoted a certain brand of green tea in fairly good Japanese. A cult show on Japanese television is the so-called "Iron Chef." In this show, two chefs, usually one Asian and one European/American, compete against each other. Both must create a 4-course menu within an hour to impress the Japanese jury (who, of course, chatter in Japanese, with English subtitles providing the translation) with their exquisite delicacies. Due to the show's great success, which also attracted many Americans to the Japanese channel, the American network UPN launched the show "Iron Chef America," hosted by the now elderly and bloated William Shatner (Captain Kirk from the Enterprise), whose wife drowned in a swimming pool. A disaster, of course.
For the few Germans in San Francisco, there isn't a dedicated channel, but KMTV on channel 32 often airs something. Sometime around four in the morning, there's a program called "Germany Today" from "Deutsche Welle," which brings the most important news and some special reports weekly. The program is available in both German and English. In the English version, German celebrities often appear, stumbling through with their clumsy English, which makes me laugh until I cry. Recently, mountain climber Reinhold Messner (see illustration 8) was on, telling his story of Nanga Parbat for the umpteenth time. Although the English version was grammatically at the level of a fifth-grader and the pronunciation worse than Helmut Kohl's, he didn't care and delivered an amazing result -- the man has class, hats off!
TiVo knows that I'm interested in everything related to Germany and records it just in case. Most of the time, it's about some nonsense, like recently about an older German lady who participated in a marathon at the South Pole. Some Germans have been living here for 40 years or more, and for them, it's surely entertaining. The other German show, "Germany Live," always focuses on a German city. Recently, it was Lübeck's turn. I sat electrified in my TV chair! Lübeck! Wow! But these productions are so endearingly unprofessional (apparently produced on a very small budget) that I actually watch them sometimes.
Another source of pure television enjoyment is the commercials for the US Army, which officially has to recruit its professional soldiers and cannot rely on free cannon fodder like in Germany. Accompanied by heavy metal music, F-16s piloted by happy pilots land on aircraft carriers, and camouflaged combat swimmers coolly slide into the water from inflatable boats with rifles at the ready. Woe to the one who has to clean the gun afterward, I say as an old veteran! "Accelerate your Life" is the current slogan. And "Paid for by the US Navy" is written underneath.
Overall, the amount of advertising that American television includes is absolutely unbearable. I believe that during prime time, there are 25 minutes of commercials for every hour of television. This means that a 90-minute movie can stretch to almost three hours. In the first hour, the commercial breaks are still cautious so that not too many viewers drop off, but towards the end, when it gets exciting and everyone wants to see the outcome, the movie is interrupted every five minutes for five minutes. Incidentally, if not all the planned commercial breaks fit into the available broadcast time, the movie is often shortened. Sometimes you don't even understand the movie anymore because important scenes are missing. The only solution is to either subscribe to a premium channel like HBO (similar to Premiere in Germany) for $30 a month and let TiVo record everything, or rent videos.
This brings me to another topic: Five years ago, while still living in Germany, I didn't realize that German-dubbed American films lose valuable information. Sure, back then I often went to the "Atlantis" cinema on Schwanthaler Street in Munich to watch films like "Terminator" in the original version--Arnie Schwarzenegger is famously priceless when he rumbles in his harsh Austrian-English. But until then, I was unaware of the fact that Americans use dialects and accents to add subtle nuances to films. Just as you can immediately recognize Munich and Hamburg residents by their dialects on German television, there are easily noticeable differences in the English-speaking world between Californians, East Coast residents (New York, etc.), Southerners (New Orleans, etc.), hillbillies (corn and potato states of the USA), Canadians, Australians, Irish, British, Scots, and foreigners who speak English with an accent: Asians, Indians, Italians, Spaniards, Russians, and Germans.
This tradition is still maintained in Hollywood. When a previously unknown character speaks in a movie, an American sitting in the cinema can determine within three seconds which continent the person comes from. Just as someone in a Hamburg bakery saying "Gehm's mer mol zwoa Semmel, bittschön!" would immediately be identified as Bavarian, it is noticeable in films like "Crocodile Dundee" that the hero greets people with an Australian "G'Day Mate," which is unheard of in the USA. Such nuances are naturally lost in the German translation--unless Crocodile Dundee were to speak Bavarian in New York, which could, of course, unleash unexpected comedic energy if he were to throw a firm "Grüß Gott!" at the doorman.
In the numerous Nazi films made in the USA, the ringleaders speak short German phrases that every American knows: "Schnell, Schnell!" (Quick, Quick!), "Marsch!" (March!), "Blitzkrieg!" -- and otherwise, of course, English with ludicrous grammar. They pronounce the "th" in English as a hissing "s" (American "z"), and the English "r," which usually resides in the back of the throat with a rolled tongue, is either rolled Bavarian-style or rasped North German-style. The English "w," typically pronounced as "uua," is pronounced like the German "w," similar to how Americans pronounce "v." So, if two flustered Nazis in a film wonder where their leader is, they say in correct film English, "Vere is ze Hauptmann?" (Where is the captain?).
One must realize this: All actors in American films, regardless of nationality, speak English for obvious reasons. However, the Nazi in war films speaks with a German accent, the Australian with his broad sing-song, the Black character in hip-hop clothes with a street dialect, the Wall Street guy from New York with his dry East Coast accent, and the Brit, of course, with school English, while the Scot rolls the "r." Someone told me that in the latest "Star Wars" episode, all the villains speak either with a Japanese or German accent. Or who among you knew that the man from the engine room of the "Starship Enterprise" is called "Scotty" only because he rolls the "r" like a Scot?
In the course of the Olympic coverage, television aired a report about the Bavarian national hero and bobsled athlete Georg Hackl, who is also called the "flying white sausage" and unfortunately messed up the gold medal this time. Schorsch's English is, of course, a bit, um, limited. He spoke German while an American voice provided a translation of his audible remarks in the background for the American viewers. But the fascinating thing was: the translator spoke American with a German accent! Not even artificially -- the broadcasters specifically hired a German expatriate to present the interview with Hacklschorsch in such a way that even the last American would understand: Schorsch is from Germany.
And American TV series, as you all know, are often adapted and adopted by German broadcasters. I read that more and more Germans who are arrested in Germany insist on having their rights read to them ("Anything you say can be used against you in court, blah blah..."). These dummies probably don't know that these are the so-called Miranda Rights, which are only valid in the USA! People just watch too many American crime series.
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}