TV

B and I don't watch a lot of TV, or at least not French TV, but I thought I'd talk about a few things we've seen recently.

Most of our TV viewing is American shows we download (Daily Show, How I met your mother, Desperate Housewives, Big Bang Theory...) but occasionally B has some Japanese series we'll watch and of course we watch quite a few movies.

Now that the new season has started, B watches NoLife again, and I've rediscovered Médias le Magazine on France 5, but we rarely catch the news (except CNN, but that's 24/7) and never plan around a certain show at a certain hour/day.

A couple weeks ago I discovered that W9 shows Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares in the evenings (from 8:30 to 10 or so, Tuesday nights). I discovered the show on BBC America back in the states and I really really like it. The American version is not quite as good (I think they edit it to make the conflict more prominent) but it's still fun to watch. Last night we happened across the 3 or 4 episodes W9 was airing and had a good laugh at the chefs with huge egos who started out saying Ramsey was all wrong, and by the end of the episode were saying he was their savior. W9 shows a mix of British and American episodes, but in a weird attempt to make it seem like a cooking show they have a woman and a French chef in a kitchen set introduce and close each episode. Actually it's just the woman who does the talking and B made a joke about how the chef was a flower pot. They're dubbed but without erasing the original sound, so we could figure out which swear words they chose to leave out of the French version.

After the series of episodes, we saw a disclaimer screen saying what we were about to see would not necessarily solve psychological or physical problems. "Huh?" we said, and continued watching. What followed was horrible: Prêtes à tout pour plaire

Imagine Extreme Make-over crossed with Survivor. These poor unattractive women had to compete in challenges in order to qualify for certain aspects of their make-over. Almost everyone was having plastic surgery and the promo for the episode shows women with bandages over their noses. We didn't watch long enough to figure it out, but I think the contestants are voted off, or at least get a ranking for how well their transformation is coming along. We really couldn't believe they had turned make-overs into a competition.

The link I put explains that the show is Belgian and that the contestants no longer feel sexually attractive, so the point of the show is to become sexy again for their husband. Gag me now.

I think I'll stick to my documentaries about the French coast or the North Sea on Arte.