American TV Series - French Style

Some of the ways I have been able to stay in touch with American culture while living abroad have been to go to the movies, read US magazines and newspapers, stay in-tune to information on the Internet, regularly review podcasts, and finally watch French TV! Many of the popular American TV series make their way to syndication on French television channels, so one only needs to deal with some inconveniences such as French voice dubbing, previous seasons episodes, and sometimes episode mis-sequencing. Of course there are some advantages as well, such as fewer commercial breaks and multiple episodes per night.

Some of the series we are able to watch here in France are: Desperate Housewives, Prison Break, Cold Case, Grey's Anatomy, ER, and most of the CSI crime solving inspired shows. We don't have cable or satellite TV, so these are some of the shows we are able to find on the regular TV channels. We also have something called TNT, which roughly translates as land based digital TV delivered over TV air frequencies. With TNT, we have a special receiver box that decodes the numeric signal so it can be displayed on the TV. TNT has several nice "free" features such as the ability to see an evening program guide, sometimes change the audio version and subtitle options. While regular TV does often provide the subtitle feature, the subtitles will always be in French. This is a great way to improve ones French language comprehension, but is sometimes frustrating when watching an American series and knowing that some of the dialogue or jokes don't translate nicely.

The French language voice dubbing can sometimes be funny, especially when one is familiar the actual actors voice. On Desperate Housewives, most of the french female voices tend to sound the same to me and inflections and nuances of voice are often lacking when compared to the VO (original version). Ethnic dialects all seem to get lost when dubbing in another language, but I guess this is the price to pay for this method of presentation. Subtitles in French also show some of the weaknesses of translations. Some jokes, slang, and product references are "funny" when considered in the French context. Recently on some of the TNT emissions, I found that I can select VO for the audio track and watch in in English! This is great, but unfortunately limited to selected shows at this point (Grey's Anatomy for one).

Another issue with syndication is that we are always at least one season behind the US programming. I guess the time it takes to do the translations, subtitles and get the foreign rights accounts for this. We will also see episodes shown out of sequence, particularly with Cold Case, where some of the main characters appear and disappear and then appear again in illogical timing. This is more apparent here because of one of the great features of French TV where they will show multiple episodes in one evening. We often will sit down to two or three episodes in one evening of a show like Cold Case or Grey's Anatomy.

Another great feature of French TV that is wonderful in comparison to the American system is the frequency of commercial breaks. On US shows these seem to occur every five minutes (I know this is an exaggeration, but they are very frequent!). On French TV there will only be one commercial break during a normal hour show from an American series. Just enough time to check emails, fold some clothes, or make a quick phone call.

Hope you have found this informative and useful.....or maybe a little entertaining?