Come on in, there is something for everyone!

We have such an international group here, I thought it would be interesting to create a topic where we can discuss various aspects of foreign culture and have an open forum for legitimate questions. Feel free to ask for translations as well.

A couple of guidelines:

-Respect each other *and* your cultural differences.
-Be careful with religion and politics
-Keep it classy

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1342261-international-inquiries/
http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1342755-the-travelers-tavern-international-inquiries-ii/
http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1343569-the-travelers-tavern-iii/
http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1346072-the-travelers-tavern-iv/
　

Americans, what do you think of the TV your country produces? From this side of the pond it seems like you guys can make animated comedies (The Simpsons, Futurama) and a few dramas (House, Mad Men, The Walking Dead) really well, and everything else svcks. You also seem to remake a lot of British shows. Why is this?

I remember talking to Ratslayer about this quite a bit in our first thread here. I'll repost my answer from then:


As for what I think of what we have...I don't watch much television really, so it's hard to say. Some good, some bad. And Saturday Night Live...which is uniquely American and falls under the great.

I find most of our tv is garbage. I don't enjoy crime dramas and I'd say a good 90% of the shows are just that. If I wanted to see stuff about murders and other crime, I could watch the news. I mostly just watch food, travel, and real estate, with a few silly shows that I enjoy mixed in. I don't really watch much TV in general though.

And, we have an American "Top Gear" but I just can't watch it. The British version is 100x better. Though - do you guys find our humor odd? What makes me laugh the most on Top Gear is how strange their humor seems to me. I've never been able to understand the jokes in Monty Python or Are You Being Served... Then again, I don't really find most of what the average American finds humorous to be funny at all either.

Isn't Monty Python a British movie?

What, you don't like Real Kardashian Housewives of Jersey Shore?

I sort of look at it as the American TV networks realizing that they can make more money airing a zillion bad TV shows over more channels than they can airing quality programming over less air. I mean, just look at the number of basic cable channels the average provider carries and the percentage of time those channels spend airing low-rent, low-risk reality shows.

There's also no accounting for taste. There are a lot of people here. Shows that I think are terrible might be someone else's favorite shows. Some people never seem to tire of seeing different characters play out the same sit-com plots over and over again. When you have that large an audience it probably starts to become profitable to cater to more separate demographics. And again, on the volume subject, I've watched quite a lot more UK television that the average American, and it isn't as though they're all winners either.

As far as re-makes go...that seems obvious to me. Take a formula that has already been tested on an audience in another country and change it so that people in another find it easier for them to relate to/digest. Many Americans aren't as accustomed to consuming media from other cultures as people from, say, Europe (who are exposed to neighboring cultures more often) are. I mean, unless you count Canada.

they made some movies [monty python and the holy grail, life of brian, the meaning of life] however the television series was 10 times more funny, although it did have quite a few dull moments relating to 70's british pop culture references that even few people from britain would understand either.

their first movie was just some of their more popular sketches from the television show reshot, it was a flop.

Oh yeah! I forgot about that stuff too...

What is the fascination with New Jersey all of the sudden?


And to anyone outside the US: The talk about food in the previous threads actually made me curious what types of foods are available to you. I know you mentioned food chains and certain types of restaurants, but if you wanted to cook at home a truly French meal in Australia or truly Japanese meal in England - could you? Like.. do you have world markets that have mostly all imports of various ingredients? I know there are some about an hour from me so I've never gone, but I'm dying to! I don't much care what it is, I love getting a taste of places far away.

Edit: I guess I should finish reading the other thread. As for peanut butter - it's an absolute staple here in the US. Personally, I like the smooth creamy kind unless I'm baking and then sometimes I use crunchy (which is smooth with bits of peanuts stirred in). Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are a US kid's saving grace. Heck, I still eat them at least once or twice a week. In fact, I may have to made a midnight PBnJ snack now that we're talking about it...

I think it used to be better in the past, or maybe my tastes have changed over time. I used to watch a lot of TV, but now I can flip through all the channels and not find a single thing worth watching.

Yeah I live in Glasgow.
Basically they all relate to the same thing, the area you're from.
Their use just depends on who you're talking to, neds tend to me the most common users of the word "scheme" "Get oot ma scheme!" being the most common use.

can't really think of many ways to further define them since they are all the same thing really and their use just depends on who you talk to.

That sounds a bit like what other places might refer to as a district?

District seems a little upper class or inner city based.
When I think of districts I picture a busy town/city covered with grey dull buildings - the places I, like many others, refer to as schemes/communities/neighbourhood don't look like my version of a district

I have tons of asian supermarkets in town where I can get anything I need for Asian cooking. We also have a very big Middle Eastern supermarket where I usually buy a lot of spices and rice.
We can get most sorts of meat and fish fresh, and there are a lot of vegetable stores all over the city. So yeah, I can get pretty much anything I need to make foreign foods.

Foreign ingredients are not easy to get a hold of here, unless they're used in Indian or Muslim dishes. There are basic Asian ingredients like mushrooms and sauces, but apart from that -- There's just not enough of a market for it, unless you charge very inflated prices. The cost and time that it takes to import something usually isn't worth it. As an example, it's difficult to purchase fresh walnuts here; if you do find them, they cost 3x 5x what they would in the north, and they're either stale or moldy.

On the upside, fruit and meat is incredibly cheap and tasty here. And I like fruit and meat, so I'm happy.


Hahah. Okay, I get it. Are there really different naming conventions for different class strata? That's a bit...

Its just whatever you grew up with or who you're talking to. Like me for example depending on who I'm talking to I'll address my area as "...my scheme..." since thats the word I grew up with and the place is infact a housing scheme. Mostly though I just refer to the whole entire area as "...ma bit..." (wee bit of slang there, oh no )
Whenever I see signs using "neighbourhood" I commonly think of elderly people for some reason, and "community" is used mostly by people trying to remain formal like the councils or TV news.

Well yeah, that makes sense, but it very rarely seems to go in the opposite direction - I can't think of a single British show based on an American one off the top of my head.

There's a Law & Order: London. Or has that been cancelled already?

Are you sure you weren't just watching footage of the riots last summer?

No, really. It has Scotland Yard as its police HQ. Oh: it was called http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1166893/.

I'd assume the UK version of Law & Order has been cancelled
Anything America produces for TV will often work here without any problems, I'd assume, and there is really no need to change it to suit.
Friends, Family Guy, South Park, The Simpsons, CSI, Criminal Minds, Heroes....The list goes on

The reason that American TV works elsewhere is that it's saturated a lot of other countries' screens. There's no reason other countries couldn't do just as well there, come to think of it. It's just a matter of getting enough of the content to be seen that people start to understand the context and tropes. The cultures of which most people in the world have a very firm grasp are America, Britain, France and Japan, because they've managed to export so much of it through TV and cinema... and now video games. (I suppose Germany would qualify in the last category, and Britain and France would mostly not.)

Codemasters, Rockstar, Creative Assembly, Rare, Rocksteady, Eidos, Ninja Theory, Lionhead, Reflections and Traveller's Tales would like a word with you

Ehhh... But how many of the games that they make are trying to appeal to American audiences, and are therefore "Americanised"? I'm talking about an exporting of culture, not just product. It's a matter of opinion. That was mine.

Grand Theft Auto is pretty damn Americanised.

So Americanised it's based in and on some of their most iconic cities