Remember, I visit Canada every year as well and my comments apply equally. Indeed, much of the TV I watch in Canada is US TV. Sadly even the cable channels I watch in Canada are very limited in their choice.

There might be worse TV than American TV - but I have never seen any English-language TV that is as bad. I can't judge foreign language programmes.

Of course, there are some UK TV programmes that are not all that good and I suppose I am biased insofar as I simply don't watch the likes of "Big Brother" and other programmes whose main aim seems to be titilate by showing others' discomfiture.

I agree that there's good (indeed wonderful) beer in the USA and it is my great hope that craft beers will evetually achieve something better than their present 6% penetration and that they will be available in most pubs and bars, rather than simply in a select few.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Kalleh:

I can only say that I have the utmost respect for our English friends. They have great TV, inventions, museums, art, music, and even food. I think most Americans feel that way.
/QUOTE]

Well definitely (at least as regards TV, inventions, museums, art, & music...

I'd love to know what programs Richard watches that he considers so awful. For example, "Law and Order," "The Closer," "The Big Bang Theory," "Face the Nation," "Great Performances at the Met," to name a few, aren't "awful."

Is he talking about the reality shows? I am flummoxed as to his very negative reaction. Heck, whenever he stayed with us, we didn't even watch television.

I am not sure what else to say here...

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:
I'd love to know what programs Richard watches that he considers so awful. For example, "Law and Order," "The Closer," "The Big Bang Theory," "Face the Nation," "Great Performances at the Met," to name a few, aren't "awful."

Is he talking about the reality shows? I am flummoxed as to his very negative reaction. Heck, whenever he stayed with us, we didn't even watch television.

I am not sure what else to say here...

As I wrote, it's not only US TV shows - Canadian TV is pretty bad as well. And I know we spent little time watching TV during our enjoyable sojourns in Chicago - indeed, the only show I recall watching at yours was the remake of the "Andromeda Strain", which was filmed in Hedley, where our son (who was an extra in the film) lives.

But I have been the the USA many times in the 33 years that have elapsed since my first visit (to New York and Los Angeles) in 1979 and, having stayed in hotels on most of those occasions (with little to do during the evenings) was exposed to far too much US TV. Probably my greatest irritation (although I concede that the choice in a hotel is a matter for the hotel's management) is that there are few international news programmes but many, many sports programmes. I have rarely stayed in a US hotel that had BBC World and never one that had Al Jazeera (now one of the best broadcasters of international news).

And almost all US and Canadian programmes suffer from the "...and we'll be right back..." syndrome which means that you'll be stuck with some anoetic advertising for some pointless product for minutes on end.

quote:

Originally posted by bethree5:
[QUOTE]Originally posted by Kalleh:

I can only say that I have the utmost respect for our English friends. They have great TV, inventions, museums, art, music, and even food. I think most Americans feel that way.
/QUOTE]

Well definitely (at least as regards TV, inventions, museums, art, & music...

Your implied criticism of British food is fair - or rather, was fair. Our food and our restaurants were poor compared with most of what the rest of the world had to offer for many years after WW2. To be fair, rationing and Britain's fanancial situation had much to do with this.

However, things have changed massively in my own lifetime and I believe that this has much to do with Britain's pioneering package holiday business. By the 1970s massive numbers of Britons were travelling abroad and experiencing such things as Mediterranean food and wines - and started to demand these kinds of things at home. Our population, with its high proportion of immigrants, meant that there were many Spaniards, Indians and Chinese around to start up their ethnic restaurants (I believe the first Chinese restaurant in the UK was the Hong Kong Emporium in Shaftesbury Avenue, which I visited as a schoolboy - now of course there are thousands of them).

London must now be one of the best cities in the world to eat - although most of the choices will be foreign restaurants; there isn't really a true British cuisine (although curries are supposed to be the most popular style of food in England - some of which were invented here).

Of course, there shouldn't ever be any doubt about which country has the best beer and pubs...

Well, isn't this a dandy little argument I've finally walked in on?
There seems to be a conflation of two entirely distinct issues.

The two propositions, as far as I can make out from the thread , seem to be

1) The way that advertising breaks upo the programs is crap.
2) American television is crap

Now while I don't imagine many Americans would disagree with proposition one, proposition two does not in any way follow on from it.

The truth is that ninety per cent of everything is crap. Living in China I get my programs by DVD or download and I can tell you that whether we are talking about the US or the UK there is the full range from utterly unbearable drivel to sublimely wonderfull drama.

As for the advertising I can only assume Richard that you do not watch any British cable channels. In my recent trip to the UK I stayed at my friend John's house and had plenty of chance to do so. The advertising breaks on some channels last for anything up to about ten minutes a time and occupy about a third of the broadcast time.

I can't see how this issue is connected with the quality of the shows.

The shows people watch, including you, me and Uncle Tom Cobley and all are entirely down to taste.

There are many woinderful shows.

Big Bang Theory has managed to make the nerdiest of nerd jokes into an hilarious national phenomenon.
Castle is a standard police procedural but done with a great deal of imagination and well-drawn characters
Boston Legal manages to squeeze some massively subversive themes into its grandly tongue-in-cheek courtroom drama.
The Unit, Lost, Nikita, Rescue Me, Flashforward, are all (and I realise some are no longer airing) great dramas.
How I Met Your Mother, The Office (US version), Big Bang Theory, 30 Rock, are excellent comedy.
The offbeeat thrives especially well - Eureka, Warehouse 13, Fringe for example.
Badly Drawn is a trully disgusting and insanely funny pornographic cartoon.

I suppose that someone determined to dislike US TV could pick faults with all of them but the simple truth is it is no worse and no better than UK TV - which is to say both contain the good, the bad and the very very ugly.

1) The way that advertising breaks upo the programs is crap.

Since most of the shows are produced to be on commercial TV, they are designed to fall into chunks (sometimes called acts) that are amenable to inserting ads. Needless to say I hate ads, but even the US public broadcast channels now have ads, but only between shows.

2) American television is crap

Yes, Bob, I agree with you and Ted Sturgeon who said: "I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud." He said it about science fiction, but it applies to everything.

When I was a youth, I like many of my peers assumed that UK TV was the best on the planet. This was not based on any great exposure to TV programs from the UK, just on a selective range of TV that had been imported into the US, mainly on public broadcast channels. It wasn't until I actually went to the UK that I discovered they had a channel other than the BBC ones and that like in the US there was much manure amongst the flowers. I felt the same about UK comedy based solely upon The Goon Show and Monty Python's Flying Circus, but then I was exposed to The Benny Hill Show.

I have been giving commercial TV a rest since discovering the joys of streaming content over the web (to be finally delivered on TVs or computer monitors). I have been watching such great (in the only opinion which truly matters to me, mine own) shows, all without commercial interruption: Breaking Bad (US), Foyle's War (UK), Mad Men (US), IT Crowd (UK), Firefly (US), Father Jack (UK), and Louie (US).

It's bad enough you're inundated by ads on TV, now you have to sit through ads as long as 30 seconds just to read a news story online. I turn off the sound and read.

And, as I said earlier, there are a whole lot of technologies now (and pretty cheap) where you can record TV shows and don't have to watch any commercials if that's a bother to you.

Just tonight, here in Washington DC, I turned on my TV as I got back to my room following dinner, and the first program up was an excellent Italian opera...with no commercials. Not too shabby.

The worst of this discussion is that I can't believe I am supporting American television! Some of it is good, but, as Bob says, about 90% is drek.