I was born and raised in the US, and lived in California for most of my life. In late 2006, I moved with my wife and two kids to New Zealand. Even though I've traveled quite a bit, I didn't completely know what to expect living in another country. One thing that surprised me was how I slowly began to see the US in quite a different way when I could see it from the outside.
I've had a difficult time explaining this to my friends and family, but I've recently had an experience that I thought I would share, to see if it might help get some small part of it across.
[[MORE]]I think we can use TV shows to gain insight into the societies that create them. They tend to reflect our morals, priorities, interests, etc. Even if we don't agree with the themes and content of a specific show, the standards that are used in script writing are relatively consistent from one show to another, and many themes are repeated time after time: pro-police, pro-government, pro-military, etc, etc. I'm not talking so much about cable or pay-TV shows, since they have enough freedom to do things differently from time to time. I'm talking about advertiser-sponsored broadcast TV; there's a lot of content that sponsors won't allow, on top of limits (censoring) by the FCC, and of course the priorities of the TV networks and the people who run them.
A few weeks ago, I discovered something that I thought was interesting. There is a very popular TV show in New Zealand, called "Outrageous Fortune." It's shown on broadcast TV here, complete with advertising (both traditional and product placement). It's in its sixth season, and I've heard that roughly 1 in 4 people in the country watch it. With that level of success, someone decided that it would be worth showing it in the much larger US market (4M people here vs. 300M there). However, the show as-is has a lot of NZ cultural references (things like Maori terms and local slang) and other "quirks," so they decided to do a remake, which is called "Scoundrels," now in its first season. The scripts are almost, but not quite, identical -- and it is precisely those differences that make for a very interesting social commentary.
Here's a short video that previews the third season of Outrageous Fortune, to give you an idea of what it's like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94OawKbP6bc
What I'd like to suggest is the following: first, watch at least the first two, but hopefully the first 3 or 4 episodes of Scoundrels. Then, watch the same number of eps of Outrageous Fortune, from its first season (available on DVD or torrent). Try not to get distracted by the acting. Instead, listen to the script and look for the words and scenes that were changed, and at the theme and feeling of the story. Then ask yourself why the people who run broadcast TV in the US don't want you to see and hear the things they censored.
One small example is swearing. The usual argument I remember in the US in favor of censorship is that parents supposedly don't want their kids to copy those words; yet shows about violence are perfectly OK. So we're supposed to believe that the kids will uncontrollably copy swearing, but won't copy the violence? That somehow TV will circumvent or replace morality? And yet most normal kids are exposed to swearing regularly in everyday life.
Another example is how sex is portrayed. The NZ version is reasonably explicit at times, including showing topless women and the type of (simulated) sex scenes you might see on HBO or Showtime in the US. Those scenes have been "sanitized" in the US version.
The result is that US TV lives in this "vanilla-ized," conflicted world that tries to portray (semi)-realistic environments, but with a bunch of the stuff that actually happens in reality filtered out; that, in turn, substantially reduces the level of entertainment they provide. A major foundation of entertainment is being able to relate on some level to a show and its characters. The more detached a show is from reality, the less entertaining it becomes.
I'm not sure this will make any sense -- at least not at first. But if you have a chance to watch both shows, I would love to hear your reaction.
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