French TV

French TV is pretty funny, so I thought I'd dedicate one post just to this interesting phenomenon. The overall quality of TV is much lower. I notice it a lot more, because my host family tends to leave the TV on during breakfast and dinner and sometimes the afternoon, whereas my family at home almost never watches TV. But especially in the early evening after coming home from school, there are some astonishingly terrible shows on French TV (which, by the way, has 4 main channels – TF1, France 2, France 3, and astonishingly, France 4). A lot of them are game shows in the style of Jeopardy, like “L'étoile mystérieuse” of TF1. These game shows have two differences from the few I've seen in the US: 1) they are really cheesy-looking, with décor that looks straight out of the '80s, and the people on these shows look like actual real people that TF1 just picked up off the streets and brought in to play a game.

L'étoile Mystérieuse with one of their incredibly normal-looking participants:

2) The level of trivia is much lower than on American shows. They ask questions that even I know the answer to, and I know a lot of things, but my general cultural knowledge is obviously different from that of other French people. I get the feeling that's much in the same spirit that makes everything else in France seem so much less competitive – French people just don't get intense about stuff, usually. In the US, if a thing exists, there are fanatics for it. There are video game fanatics and piano-playing fanatics and programming fanatics and people who spend years studying for trivia shows. I'm sure studies would support my assertion that the US has a really remarkable level of high achievement in economically-useful fields such as technology and innovation, but also a remarkably high level of achievement and competition in useless fields like video game competitions and trivia shows. This is partly because the US is really big compared to populous but tiny European countries, but partly because Americans have the fanatic mindset. My Frisbee coach agrees with me – Americans, he told me, are all crazy. You can go from inventing the iPhone to doing a thousand-person flashmob, and no one would bat an eyelash. You just do crazy things.

Aside from game shows, many of them are American shows redubbed in French: “Le Mentalist”, “Les Experts” (CSI), “House”, and “Esprits Criminels” (Criminal Minds) are some popular examples. These shows are incredibly difficult for me to watch, because the lips don't move in time with the voices, and I rely heavily on watching people's faces to understand what they're saying. I also find that the voices don't go well with the characters. For example, in the Mentalist, which was one of my favorite shows at home, Patrick Jane is wry, mocking prankster-detective with a light tenor voice. The ridiculous things he says and does, like accusing random people of very bad things just to get them angry and start talking, are delivered in a breezy, nonchalant, really irritating and clever way. I love it. Simon Baker, the actor, has the perfect face and voice for the job. But in the French redub, his voice is lower, more serious, and doesn't express every word with the mocking, intellectually-superior contempt of his Anglophone counterpart. It actually sounds like he's getting mad at the people he's trying to irritate, which doesn't fit his character at all. Jane should be aloof, unruffled, and coolly irritating, not irritated. I had a discussion with a friend of mine who likes to watch TV shows and movies in their original English with subtitles, because she doesn't like the French voice actors either. Especially when Lord of the Rings (my favorite movies ever) were on, I couldn't stand watching them in French, hearing the voices butchered, and all the jokes slightly off.

The other thing that threw me off in LOTR was the “vous” usage. “Vous”, for those of you who don't know, is the French formal singular or plural form of “you”. (“Usted” in Spanish, I believe.) Using vous is a veritable minefield for foreigners. The French reassure me it's quite simple – vous is for adults who I don't know yet, or teachers or anyone in a professional position, except friends of my host parents. But I keep finding more exceptions! Even adults I know well, like my host grandparents, still have to be vous-ed because their advanced age requires it. And some adults in a professional situation can be tu-ed (you informal), like Patrick the Exuberant Janitor at my high school. And some adults who aren't very advanced in age still have to be vous-ed even if you know them well, like the parents of your Significant Other. (My host sister uses vous for her long-term boyfriend's parents, and even my host parents use vous with each others' parents.) All these subtleties don't make it easy, but even the basics – remembering not to use tu with my teachers at school, for example – are difficult for me and incredibly important. I accidentally used tu with my physics teacher in the first week of school, and shocked everyone in the classroom. Oops. For us Modern English speakers (Middle English had informal thee and thou and formal you), it's awfully difficult to distinguish the two, not to mention how tricky the verb conjugations for vous are. I aced all my conjugation tests in French class, but on the fly when I'm speaking? It's a little more stressful.

As my SVT teacher would say, “Je ferme ma parenthèse.” (Close parentheses.) All of that was just a background explanation for why LOTR is bizarre in French. They all use vous with each other! It would make sense if the hobbits used vous for Gandalf and Aragorn and all the random elvish and human nobility they meet, but Gandalf uses vous for the hobbits in return. For me, every time he says “Peregrin Took!” it is not to be respectful, but to scold Pippin like the naughty boy he is. So since when does someone as small and foolish as Pippin get a title of respect that in my mind corresponds roughly to “Mister”? If memory serves, all the characters used vous for each other in the 2^nd movie except Frodo to Sam. (Sam, of course, refers to Mister Frodo as vous, which seems accurate.) I don't know. I clearly don't understand all the subtleties of this blasted vous/tu stuff, but it seems to me that LOTR developed some awfully bizarre and unintentional undertones with all this vous-ing.

Similarly, in the cop shows I so love and adore, like the Mentalist, I keep being taken aback by the friendly banter between cop colleagues (who, in the show, are portrayed as living only for their job, with the other cops as their only friends) involving constant use of vous. I know in a professional situation, vous is only appropriate, but I feel like in the American culture of work-addicted, casual, friendly professionals, we could easily slip into tu-ing territory with our colleagues, if we spoke French. Who knows. But to me, it breaks the atmosphere.

The last funny thing about bad French TV is the news. I have seen 3 or 4 times where the live reporting from some third-world country, war front, or weather front went wrong, and they had to awkwardly change the schedule. “Ed, what can you tell us about the hurricane in Manhattan?” * Ed doesn't respond, and looks blankly at the camera. Nervous chuckle from the show host. * “Ed? How is everything looking in Manhattan, Ed?” No response. 10 seconds later, Ed starts to talk, but we have no sound, and so they cut back to the show host, who awkwardly apologizes to the audience and goes on to the next topic. I'm sure that must happen sometimes in the US, too, but I'm sure I've never seen it because it completely shocked me, the first time I saw it in France. Like I said, I didn't watch much TV at home, but I still think this must happen less in the US simply because that sort of technical failure is the sort of thing French people would accept as inevitable every once in a while and live with, while the Americans would set up backup after backup to make sure such an embarrassment would never occur on their channel.

This being said, bad French TV can sometimes be pretty darn entertaining. My host sister and I are currently really into a sort of reality show called Coup de Foudre au Prochain Village (Love at first sight at the next village).

There's a bunch of single women in a bus looking to fall madly in love, and they go from small rural village to small rural village in the south of France, meeting the bachelors of each village. At first sight they have to choose which bachelor to spend time with, and then they get two days with their bachelor in which to decide whether to stay with him or get back on the bus to go on to the next village. It's ridiculous and petty and I don't want to miss a single episode.

Wow, I officially have a verbiage problem: I can write over 2 pages about TV. Help! I think I'll try doing mini-blog posts (I get to call them mini if they're under 4 pages, right?) about a lot of different living-abroad topics for my future exchange students who are reading this blog, and everyone else because it's interesting to know the differences. I already did one on school, the idea of presentation, and food, but I might update them a little bit, and I'd also like to talk about higher education, fashion, language learning progression, and whatever else comes to mind. Let me know if there are any topics you'd be interested in hearing about.