Criticizing TV From Another Country
One thing that has helped my wife’s homesickness for China is watching Chinese TV shows on her computer. She’s even started watching shows she normally didn’t care about, like the multitude of war-time dramas, because, hey, at least it’s in Chinese. One of the shows she’s been enjoying is a Taiwanese “game show” where a group of people sit around a table and play a “find the murderer” parlor game. There are a lot of variations of this, so I’m sure you’ve played it at a party sometime in your life. Two people are killers, two people are police officers, and the rest are civilians. The killers are trying to figure out who the police officers are (and kill them) before the civilians figure out who the killers are and boot them from the table.
It seems silly that there would be a TV show focused entirely on something we play with our friends when we’re bored, especially since the people on the show wear costumes and really ham it up. I recall coming across a lot of similarly goofy and dumb shows when I would click through the channels in China, looking for something (anything!) I could stand to watch. But if viewing episodes of The Soup has taught me anything, it’s that Americans have no room to criticize. We have some truly awful, pointless, embarrassing TV shows right here in our own country. I’m looking at you, Jersey Shore. In comparison, a “find the murderer” parlor game doesn’t seem so bad.
Response to “Criticizing TV From Another Country”
Comments RSS Feed – All CommentsClark — 31 January 2012 @ 8:14 pm
This counts as my second blog post for January! I’ve been trying to do at least two a month, but I’m having a hard time even meeting that goal.
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