I've been watching a bit more Chinese TV as of late (both because I'm trying to spend more time with Nancy/listening to Chinese... and I'm just about out of new shows to download right now). In spite of the impossibly high language barrier to entry, enjoyment can be found by even a language-deaf foreigner like me... mostly by MST3K'ing these shows to myself as I watch them. And believe me, specifics of the dialogues aside, there's plenty to mock about Chinese TV...
Commercials
There's just so much to love/give you an aneurysm about Chinese commercials. Chalk it up to my jaded, savvy American mind, but they're just ridiculous. They promise ridiculous things, and paint ridiculous scenarios. They're American commercials before people realized that commercials are total BS.
Toothpaste is not only cause to throw a pool party, but turns you into a retarded manga cartoon. Every single product, including diarrhea medicine has its own cutesy, cartoon spokesthing. Beer still has the power to grant wishes... just by pouring it.
Not to mention that apparently somewhere along the chain of command, someone has made the decision that it's best to buy as many time slots as is humanly possible. In any one commercial break there are no less than 3 repeats of the exact same commercial advertising laxative tea to the elderly. When I go on the subway, no lie, every 3 and a half minutes comes on a commercial featuring a woman riding a donkey (it sounds kinkier than it is), and advertising for Ganji, an EBay clone shopping site. Added to that is the fact that each time she starts the commercial by screaming the name of the company as loud as possible. It's is because of Ganji that I bought a new pair of headphones... but unfortunately for them, not from them.
Oh yeah. And every. God. Damned. Thing. Rhymes.
Everything
Forever
And ever
Amen.
Reality Shows
China seems obsessed with reality shows... but not as we know them. It's not a Survivor clone, nor Who Wants to Be a Millionaire that seems to be everywhere (though they do exist)... but rather these banal, boring versions of Jerry Springer or the Maury Povich show.
Imagine Jerry Springer if there were no transvestite baby-daddies, cross-dressing trucker hookers, or midget porn stars. Now imagine That Jerry's final thought was the entire second half of the show, and was in fact a lecture complete with podium to the audience about whatever evil happened to be the topic of the day (today's appears to be "not beating your gal on the side who's mother of your 3 illegitimate children"). And imagine Jerry isn't Jerry, but a portly, middle-aged Chinese woman with a voice like raking gravel and a face that makes you think Mao didn't look so bad. Sternly lecturing her audience and everyone else. How does this get a show?!
Other than that, there are the near ubiquitous dating shows. Great, thinks you, Joe McForeignviewer, something along the lines of Blind Date or, hell, even Next. Nope. Instead, men are brought out one by one like the condemned brought before the firing squad... the firing squad being an extremely intimidating ring of potential mothers in law (keep in mind, at this point and through the course of the entire program there is neither hide nor hair of any of the actual prospective women to date... just the grim, stony mothers. To give these sacrificial male lambs some sliver of hope, they are presented with a montage of the photos of the women they'll probably never meet). These gargoyles then commence with what is, in effect, a hostile interrogation - aided by several separate judges and a camera crew picking apart the guy's life. Each time a mother decides that her daughter's too good for the guy, she get a chance to personally berate what she thinks are his shortcomings.
The only reason that a show as punishingly brutal as this has survived more than 3 episodes, I'm sure, is that there are just so many desperate men in China willing to walk barefoot over broken glass, arm wrestle a gorilla, or eat live spiders for a chance with a girl. My question is: Why don't they make a show about that instead?! I'd be thrilled to watch desperate guys be tasked with a castrating an unrestrained tiger for a date with a girl... but watching mothers grill him? Pass.
(CS) TAW Out.
The lycanthropic jottings of my fourth year prowling the Chinese moonlight.
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