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selenakWell, first of all: there is such a LOT of it.
Seriously, though. It's different in 2013 than it was in the 1980s when I first visited the US, obviously - back then, we just had a few private network channels, now we have more - but still, compared to the number of tv channels existing at any given spot in the US I visited: not that many.
Another difference, also changing: the advertisment space. Back when I was a wee teenageselenak, I was bemused, bewildered and irritated by the fact that practically every five minutes, there was a break for ads. Even between the final scene of a tv episode and the credits. We did not have those in the early 80s, the ads were what happened in between programs only. This has changed, though again, not (yet) to the same amount. Thing is, a lot of American tv shows have their episodes written specifically with the ads in mind, so you get emotional beats just before an expected break. And even our private channels who have several ad breaks never bother to replicate these particular breaks to insert their own ads. This means you yet some weird cuts when an episode is broadcast on German tv, like:
Jealous husband: Admit! He's your lover!
Defiant wife, to swelling music: No! If you must now - he's my secret son!
*This was evidently where an ad was placed in the original US broadcast. In German tv, the scene continues without interruption, with sometimes everyone getting a dramatic close up upon this revelation twice. On the other hands, ten minutes later:
Husband: Well, why don't we all just...
*advertisement cut, no swelling music to warn for same*
Husband, later: ...have dinner togther?
A notorious case of the ad cuts being mishandled in German broadcast was the show 24, which had its episodes timed to recreate 60 minutes (counting the ad space in between) broadcast time equalling 60 minutes show action time. VOX, the German channel broadcasting 24, never bothered to consider that at all.
On the other hand: my first online fandom was Highlander: The TV Series, and there I quickly found out we Europeans, due to German and French money co-financing said show, were getting something rather neat referred to in the fandom as "the Eurominutes". People certainly not me used to tease American fans that these consisted solely of additional Methos material and shirtless Duncan scenes, though not necessarily at the same time. Which wasn't true, though some of the Eurominutes did contain more Methos (and/or shirtless Duncan). What happened was that the episodes were produced simultanously for a European and for an American market, and as mentioned, we didn't yet have that much ad space, so we got slightly lengthier episodes instead. Fast forward more than a decade (HL being a 1990s tv show), and this is still true for British shows like Doctor Who, in that it gets broadcast with cuts in the US. The first time I became aware of this was when it turned out Americans watching Last of the Time Lords, the s3 of New Who finale, were missing both important character stuff (Martha near the end of the ep, after the Year That Wasn't had been reversed, bringing flowers to the female scientist who'd been blackmailed into betrayal via the capture of her son) and not necessarily important but simply insanely entertaining stuff, like the Master's opening sequence to the tune of the Scissor's Sister's I can't decide, which is one of those RTD things you either love or hate. (I loved it.)
Before the arrival of HB0 and Showtime, another signature thing about American tv used to be the weird way nudity was handled. To wit: if, in a contemporary show, a couple just had sex and one of them got out of bed, he or she pulled the sheet around himself/herself before wandering through the room. Even teenage me thought "but who does that?" and decided it was one of those American body issue things comparable to not wanting to go into the sauna naked. Now, of course, you have American tv shows (from the above mentioned networks) providing its (paying) viewing public with nudity in all forms (though still more of the female than the male variety), but I think that's still not true for shows produced for networks like ABC.
And while we're talking looks: American tv ensembles, by and large, tend to be far glossier than their European counterparts, often looking as if they've stepped out of a fashion magazine. Nowadays, male actors with imperfect bodies can be leading men instead of being relegated to minor character roles (see: James Gandolfini was Tony Soprano), but that appears to be a glass ceiling the women still have to break. Not to mention that younger American actresses, again, by and large and with exceptions, seem to have to starve themselves before getting to play leading roles. (As I recall, one of the many accusations/insults aimed at Skyler White from Breaking Bad was that the actress who played her, Anna Gunn, was an exception from thinness, not just in the first two seasons when her character was pregnant but also later.) When I consciously started to watch British tv in addition to American tv, there was this shock sensation that the ensembles of characters actually looked like you could meet them in every day situations across the supermarket.
What American tv also was, is, and can be: daring and narratively experimental in a way our own productions, at least in Germany, unfortunately aren't. It's not just my share of the national pop culture inferiority complex talking here. Just look at it this way: in the US, you have the Golden Age of Television going on, with actors and writers praised. In Britain, you have the likes of Derek Jacobi guest starring on Doctor Who. In Germany, you have Christoph Waltz spending decades in a lot of forgettable tv soaps with the very rare occasional bright light before getting discovered by Quentin Tarantino and most certainly not intending to come back to German tv, ever.
Of course there are exceptions. I've raved about this before, but Todesspiel, a docudrama two parter about the so-called "German Autumn" of 1978, produced and directed by Heinrich Breloer, managed to be incredibly suspenseful both in the interview parts and the acted parts, despite everyone knowing what would happen - i.e. Hans-Martin Schleyer, the hostage the RAF (in German, this doesn't stand for Royal Air Force but Rote Armee Fraktion, whom English speaking people mostly refer to as "The Baader-Mainhof-Gang") took to blackmail Andreas Baader, Gudrun Enslin and Ulrike Mainhof out of prison, would be killed, while the passengers of the air plane Landshut would be saved - , and it was great tv by any country's standards. I also watched the first two seasons of Türkisch für Anfänger ("Turkish for Beginners", a sitcom about a German-Turkish family) with amusement and surprising (for me) emotional involvement. Still, generally speaking, it's easier to sell me on an important tv series (American, British, Danish, you name it) than on a German one.
Even if our actors are still allowed to look like normal people. :)
Seriously, though. It's different in 2013 than it was in the 1980s when I first visited the US, obviously - back then, we just had a few private network channels, now we have more - but still, compared to the number of tv channels existing at any given spot in the US I visited: not that many.
Another difference, also changing: the advertisment space. Back when I was a wee teenage
selenak, I was bemused, bewildered and irritated by the fact that practically every five minutes, there was a break for ads. Even between the final scene of a tv episode and the credits. We did not have those in the early 80s, the ads were what happened in between programs only. This has changed, though again, not (yet) to the same amount. Thing is, a lot of American tv shows have their episodes written specifically with the ads in mind, so you get emotional beats just before an expected break. And even our private channels who have several ad breaks never bother to replicate these particular breaks to insert their own ads. This means you yet some weird cuts when an episode is broadcast on German tv, like: Jealous husband: Admit! He's your lover!
Defiant wife, to swelling music: No! If you must now - he's my secret son!
*This was evidently where an ad was placed in the original US broadcast. In German tv, the scene continues without interruption, with sometimes everyone getting a dramatic close up upon this revelation twice. On the other hands, ten minutes later:
Husband: Well, why don't we all just...
*advertisement cut, no swelling music to warn for same*
Husband, later: ...have dinner togther?
A notorious case of the ad cuts being mishandled in German broadcast was the show 24, which had its episodes timed to recreate 60 minutes (counting the ad space in between) broadcast time equalling 60 minutes show action time. VOX, the German channel broadcasting 24, never bothered to consider that at all.
On the other hand: my first online fandom was Highlander: The TV Series, and there I quickly found out we Europeans, due to German and French money co-financing said show, were getting something rather neat referred to in the fandom as "the Eurominutes". People certainly not me used to tease American fans that these consisted solely of additional Methos material and shirtless Duncan scenes, though not necessarily at the same time. Which wasn't true, though some of the Eurominutes did contain more Methos (and/or shirtless Duncan). What happened was that the episodes were produced simultanously for a European and for an American market, and as mentioned, we didn't yet have that much ad space, so we got slightly lengthier episodes instead. Fast forward more than a decade (HL being a 1990s tv show), and this is still true for British shows like Doctor Who, in that it gets broadcast with cuts in the US. The first time I became aware of this was when it turned out Americans watching Last of the Time Lords, the s3 of New Who finale, were missing both important character stuff (Martha near the end of the ep, after the Year That Wasn't had been reversed, bringing flowers to the female scientist who'd been blackmailed into betrayal via the capture of her son) and not necessarily important but simply insanely entertaining stuff, like the Master's opening sequence to the tune of the Scissor's Sister's I can't decide, which is one of those RTD things you either love or hate. (I loved it.)
Before the arrival of HB0 and Showtime, another signature thing about American tv used to be the weird way nudity was handled. To wit: if, in a contemporary show, a couple just had sex and one of them got out of bed, he or she pulled the sheet around himself/herself before wandering through the room. Even teenage me thought "but who does that?" and decided it was one of those American body issue things comparable to not wanting to go into the sauna naked. Now, of course, you have American tv shows (from the above mentioned networks) providing its (paying) viewing public with nudity in all forms (though still more of the female than the male variety), but I think that's still not true for shows produced for networks like ABC.
And while we're talking looks: American tv ensembles, by and large, tend to be far glossier than their European counterparts, often looking as if they've stepped out of a fashion magazine. Nowadays, male actors with imperfect bodies can be leading men instead of being relegated to minor character roles (see: James Gandolfini was Tony Soprano), but that appears to be a glass ceiling the women still have to break. Not to mention that younger American actresses, again, by and large and with exceptions, seem to have to starve themselves before getting to play leading roles. (As I recall, one of the many accusations/insults aimed at Skyler White from Breaking Bad was that the actress who played her, Anna Gunn, was an exception from thinness, not just in the first two seasons when her character was pregnant but also later.) When I consciously started to watch British tv in addition to American tv, there was this shock sensation that the ensembles of characters actually looked like you could meet them in every day situations across the supermarket.
What American tv also was, is, and can be: daring and narratively experimental in a way our own productions, at least in Germany, unfortunately aren't. It's not just my share of the national pop culture inferiority complex talking here. Just look at it this way: in the US, you have the Golden Age of Television going on, with actors and writers praised. In Britain, you have the likes of Derek Jacobi guest starring on Doctor Who. In Germany, you have Christoph Waltz spending decades in a lot of forgettable tv soaps with the very rare occasional bright light before getting discovered by Quentin Tarantino and most certainly not intending to come back to German tv, ever.
Of course there are exceptions. I've raved about this before, but Todesspiel, a docudrama two parter about the so-called "German Autumn" of 1978, produced and directed by Heinrich Breloer, managed to be incredibly suspenseful both in the interview parts and the acted parts, despite everyone knowing what would happen - i.e. Hans-Martin Schleyer, the hostage the RAF (in German, this doesn't stand for Royal Air Force but Rote Armee Fraktion, whom English speaking people mostly refer to as "The Baader-Mainhof-Gang") took to blackmail Andreas Baader, Gudrun Enslin and Ulrike Mainhof out of prison, would be killed, while the passengers of the air plane Landshut would be saved - , and it was great tv by any country's standards. I also watched the first two seasons of Türkisch für Anfänger ("Turkish for Beginners", a sitcom about a German-Turkish family) with amusement and surprising (for me) emotional involvement. Still, generally speaking, it's easier to sell me on an important tv series (American, British, Danish, you name it) than on a German one.
Even if our actors are still allowed to look like normal people. :)
no subject
Date: 2013-12-29 10:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-30 10:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-30 06:48 pm (UTC)The main characters are a family that was torn apart when one of their twin daughters was killed - along with her class - in a horrible school bus accident, a damaged woman who is the only survivor of the serial killer and a woman whose fiance died on their wedding day and has now come back when she's on the verge of marrying the local constable.
I am really enjoying the way this show is twisting the ambiguities of the situation - very few characters getting out of this without their choices being questioned and I'm very hard pressed to think of anyone on the show who isn't sympathetic despite some of them having done horrid things - although I'm inching up on the season finale and it looks like we're getting much more metaphysical.
There's only one season of eight episodes so far.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-31 07:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-31 03:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-29 11:48 pm (UTC)Still, generally speaking, it's easier to sell me on an important tv series (American, British, Danish, you name it) than on a German one.
Same for me and an Australian one!
no subject
Date: 2013-12-30 10:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-30 01:00 pm (UTC)This happens on Swedish TV too. What really annoys me, though, is that while the ad cuts are fewer, they're So. Damned. Long. A typical ad cut on a Swedish commercial channel is 6-7 minutes. I mean, yes, it gives you time to go to the bathroom and make a sandwich, but it also gives you time to lose all interest in returning to the show. Which is one of the reasons I rarely watch TV on my TV set. (Having watched a bit of Hulu, I much prefer the shorter, more frequent ads, though of course shows without ads are still the best ones.)
Is that the case on German TV too?
American tv ensembles, by and large, tend to be far glossier than their European counterparts
Oh, definitely! Although, when there was a film festival panel discussing female genre directors, I was amused at how dressed-up and glossy the American and Canadian panelists were compared to the Swedish ones. So maybe part of it is actually real life differences between Americans and Europeans... :-)
Btw, Göran Everdahl mentioned in his book on soap operas (which I love) that classic American soaps are about the upper class, the British soaps about the working class, the Australian soaps about the middle class, and the Swedish soaps about everyone at once. (The typical example being Rederiet, about a shipping company, with the cast including everyone from mechanics to owners.)
no subject
Date: 2013-12-30 01:34 pm (UTC)Damm long cuts? You bet. More than enough time to go to the bathroom and get a sandwich.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-31 07:24 am (UTC)