Is There Anything on TV?

Someone has broached the topic of television in Spain. Yes, people in Spain do watch tv, and a fair amount of it. The tv is always on during lunch and dinner, and most people eat sitting around a table in the living room in front of the tv, although they do still talk to each other as they eat. There are only a handful of channels, so if you watch a show or a movie one evening, chances are good that a lot of your friends saw it too, making for good conversation topics. But even though there aren't too many channels we don't usually have a hard time finding something to watch that is reasonably interesting (but then things are more interesting to me in Spanish). There is about the same variety of programs here as there is in the States: news programs, football games (that's soccer for you Americans), reality shows, sit-coms, animations, game shows, etc. On the weekends they show movies in the afternoon and evening, and they're usually fairly good, i.e. this past weekend we saw the second Indiana Jones movie.

Spain has some tv shows of their own, such as some sit-coms about families who live in the same apartment building and some reality shows (mainly take-offs of American ones like America's Got Talent, except the majority of contestants either dance flamenco or sing Ave Maria), but they do show a lot of programs from other countries, such as some Japanese animations like Doraemon, or American dramas like House, CSI, and some new stupid show about ghosts. All the shows are dubbed into Spanish; they don't use subtitles here like they do in some countries. I prefer to hear them in Spanish, but it can be kind of weird to hear American actors talking in a different voice. Actually, sometimes it is easier to understand Spain's programs than the dubbed ones because all the lips match what the people are saying.

Prime time tv doesn't start until around 10:15 or 10:30, when most people eat dinner. Nothing starts on the hour or the half-hour here, and I've noticed that the times shows start can vary from day to day. It even appears to me that the same programs start later now than they did in the winter (i.e. programs that started at 10:20 may now start at 10:35).

I do have a couple shows here I really like. At lunch on every day from January to the beginning of May, we watched Fama ¡a bailar!, a reality show about young people in a dancing school learning from professors of lyrical, funky, and street dance. Every week each pair would compete against each other and one would get voted out by the professors and the public, but when they left they were replaced by new people. For sure it had its share of drama, but there wasn't any backstabbing like there is in the American reality shows. I also like El Hormiguero (the anthill), a wacky kids show on in the evening where they do science-y experiments, interview famous people, and do random other things. I like the medical show House more or less, but since I don't know the names of rare diseases in Spanish and they only reveal the problem in the last few seconds of the program, I have watched several to the end only to miss what was wrong with the person. Well, there you have it, folks... until next time, this is Lindsay, signing out...