Today has been a great day. I woke up about 8am and had breakfast. Then I uploaded a number of photos to Facebook and wrote on some friends walls. I studied some Bulgarian and then took an early afternoon nap. Today is my first day “off” in quite awhile. I feel like I’ve been going, going, going for months now. Tryavna was great but busy and the last week of intensive Bulgarian lessons has left me exhausted in the afternoons.
So today was perfect. The only thing that would have made this day better would be a Law & Order: SVU marathon. Law & Order especially Law & Order: SVU is the perfect for an afternoon of mindless tv watching. There is excitement in each episode but the story line is pretty fool-proof. A bad thing happens to a woman, a child, or someone elderly and the case is sent to SVU where Oliva and Elliot are put on the case. They track the bad guy down and then comes the law part where usually a satisfactory conclusion to the case presents itself. Although, this is not always the case. While this boilerplate description makes the tv show sound too simplistic to be interesting, it is just the opposite. The drama in catching bad guys is what makes it not only watchable but addictive.
Instead, I’ve been watching reruns of The OC dubbed over in Bulgarian. It’s really not the same at all. I think it’s a shame that the Saturday and Sunday marathons of Law and Order haven’t caught on here in Sofia. Well come to think of it, they may have seeing as I don’t have cable and only get five channels but that is beside the point.
What I am really interested in why all of our worst tv has been dubbed into Bulgarian and in many cases is advertised heavily in public. The OC is pretty bad but earlier this week, I saw that the tv show Cheaters is on from 5-6pm everyday (or at least that’s what I think I saw seeing as I am not super quick at reading Cyrillic). So here’s the summary: I’ve seen Cheaters, Wife-Swap, Monk, Spin City, So You Think You Can Dance, and even the show Gay, Straight or Taken which I can only imagine had a very short shelf life in the United States.
The reality tv shows Americans at our worst. There is no nuance. All of the people become extremes–caricatures of themselves. This hyper-characterization is laughable in the United States but it’s down right embarrassing here in Sofia. The problem is that there is nothing “normal” for a foreign viewer to use as a baseline to help them understand and make sense of both the drama and humor of an individual tv program. This is not to say that I believe that the viewer is stupid–because I don’t believe this. I just wonder how the foreign viewer actually makes sense of and digests this trashy American culture. These shows are a part of American tv culture but they are not the only thing; yet they seem to make up the majority of the dubbed American tv shows.
I guess it’s worth asking the question is a show like Law and Order or Sex in the City any better than these low-brow reality television shows? And I don’t think that there is an easy answer. These show seems to be more nuanced and there seems to be more character development but again these are tv shows and they are designed to be funny enough, salacious enough and dramatic enough to keep the viewer coming back for more in just the same way that the reality television shows do. So this is what we are selling in the United States and exporting all over the globe–American style drama that feeds on sex and violence. Is this what America is about? Yes and No but of course it is more complicated than this because it’s not like we even have a single America that we can talk about but we seem to be doing a pretty good job exporting a single idea of who we are and what we care about.
Is this who I am? And is this what I care about? Well, no. I am more than these images and these basic narratives but it seems clear that these stories are a part of what has shaped and influenced me. This said, the students I met at FISI, know these stories. For example, one night before going out, a friend said to me look at your blond hair, you must have been prom queen. Needless to say, I was not prom queen or homecoming queen or anything of the sort in high school but in a sea of brown hair mine stood out and as an American it has been reinforced over and over again in more movies and tv shows than I can count that the pretty All-American blond haired, blue eyed girl will be prom queen. I know that when she told me this, she meant it as a complement and I took it as one. Maybe I am wrong, but I don’t think anyone in the United States would make the same assumption about me.
This is why I can’t help but think, wonder and worry about which America my students are going to be familiar with. As such, I think I may come as a disappointment to them but I hope that I also surprise and challenge them to think about how we create and are created by the culture we live in. I was not prom queen and for that I am glad. But I did go to high school and from there to college and I’ve watched more episodes of Law and Order: SVU than I can count so I hope that these credentials will help me talk to my students about American culture and in the process teach them some English as well.
As for the SVU marathon, I know that Monday is Labor Day in the States and I am sure that there will be a marathon so I hope that someone will be watching for me and I hope that you get to see an episode you’ve never seen before.
I guess I’ll end on this note, these days, I would be happy to could catch an episode dubbed in Bulgarian because I am sure that this would help my Bulgarian immensely but seeing as this isn’t an option currently, I guess that catching up on exported American tv isn’t such a bad thing to do. (Oh and it turns out that I can actually understand a very, very small amount of what people are saying in Bulgarian!!)
A Law & Order Marathon is the easiest way to arrange it in BG – just ask some of your students (and they – being professors in downloading from the INTERNET of whole seasons of any popular sequel – will fill your laptop harddrive or flash with whatever you desire). Of course the issue of copyright may bother you a little, but just enjoy it!! Of course, you should watch it on the laptop, unless you have a projector or are able to plug it into the TV set. But some of the sequels you mentioned are run and re-run on many of the BG cable channels, most of them with subtitles in BG thus you can practice your BG, even with parts from old seasons. On cable they run old seasons, but on the internet you can find anything – even the newest ones (a week ortwo later at the most).