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American Television in Other Countries

elgarak said:
It should be noted that in Germany, everything's dubbed. While the technical quality is quite high, the artistic quality is only mediocre to abysmal, as fas as TV shows are concerned. It doesn't help that there are only about a handful voice over actors. At least it feels that way, as you hear the same voices all over the place (the worst experience in this regard was the combo of M*A*S*H and Hogan's Heroes, done by the same group of people, although the writing of the German dialog was excellent. Varied from the original, but nevertheless excellent).

Worse is the writing, where quite often the German writers lack essential knowledge (and time to do proper research), even on everyday phrases. Really bad it becomes with geek references. Big Bang Theory, The Simpsons and Futurama are pretty much unwatchable in the German version.
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Germany has the best Voiceover industry I have ever seen. Do you know any country or language that does it better?
 
DC said:
Germany has the best Voiceover industry I have ever seen. Do you know any country or language that does it better?
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True, but even in the best of cases the dubbed version is a different movie or TV series from the original. And, currently, the dubbing industry is not able to achieve the best when it comes to dubbing. Which becomes very evident if one compares dubbing now with dubbing from my childhood in the 70s, and earlier dubs. The decline in quality, as I observed it, coincides with the liberalization of the TV market in the mid 80s. There's simply too much material to dub to do it in high quality.

There's also this abysmally ugly rule that everything that's spoken in the original needs to be spoken as well in German. Watching mythbusters in German is horrifying, as there are German voice-overs, with the original dialog still audible. The Dutch, for instance, know at least not to do that. In documentaries, they do voice-over in Dutch replacing the original voice-over, but when there are people speaking on screen, they keep the original dialog, and do subtitles.
 
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The only thing I know we haven't had in the UK is from many years ago:
Gilligan's Island. We've had just about every other major US program in some form or other.

The only reason we know of its existence is the references in other programs. And the pinball game I used to play in a local drinking establishment.

I remember mentioning the program to some US tourists when we were on a train in N.Europe, and they immediately launched into the theme song. I cannot think of another show in the US of such seeming popularity that was never aired in the UK (as far as I know).
 
As has been mentioned US shows are popular in the UK but they are largely on cable/satellite or relegated to odd time slots on the terrestrial channels. Mind you the terrestrial channels have always been a little eccentric with scheduling their US imports, the BBC insisted on scheduling Star Trek: TNG and the later series at 6:30 on BBC2, it was a relief when it moved to Sky.
 
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