Systematiker wrote:El tiempo entre costuras was the first thing I watched when I started working on Spanish again last year. I never read the book, but the series gets a bit better, she grows a backbone and starts to take a little more charge of her life.
Yay, that gives me a little hope! So far her naive way of dealing with her problems infuriates me in every episode!
Systematiker wrote:I also watched all of Cable Girls - I suspect you won't like it, because the characters are pretty much stock and the plot is thoroughly predictable. I enjoyed it in part because precisely that it such a brainless downtime watch. El Pais panned it for having little originality, and they were right. Odd music choices, too. Again, I liked it, but I think I want something else out of video media than you do
Oh my, if even El Pais expects more from TV, then it must be really brainless You're right, I think we have different expectations. I rarely watch mindless entertainment, because it feels like a waste of time when there are so many thoroughly good things out there. I think I was 16 when I had the feeling for the first time that a whole lifetime won't be enough to read all the good books and watch all the good movies / series. University libraries give me anxiety attacks because I can't really read much more than 20,000 pages a year and only have a limited number of years on this planet. I didn't even scratch the surface of the video library of my old Film Studies department, although I watched one excellent movie a day for like a year. Basically I leave the mindless entertainment for those days when I'm really burnt out. Series are more of a daily thing though so it's somewhat painful when they stay totally predictable and ridiculous. And I already have much more tolerance there than my husband who really starts to suffer a lot if something is too "colourful". I usually only watch them in other languages though so that it's productive at least for language learning.
At the same time I think that I also have the problem of using the yardstick for the really good stuff on little silly local productions that simply don't have the ambition to be good, probably one of those moments where knowing too much about certain things ruins the enjoyment. I must remember that Spanish series are usually produced for the average ama de casa between cleaning sessions or teenagers and unemployed young people who watch everything that flickers without discernment.
I think TV is particularly bad here because this society has always been particularly conservative and bent on always making the wrong decisions. A good but somewhat depressing overview over the succession of bad decisions in Spanish history can be found in Juan Goytisolo's España y los españoles. Somewhat cynical perhaps, but very true. And Spanish decisions haven't become any better since the book was published (1979). And those are of course mainly the decisions of men, because well, Spain! It gets even more depressing when one considers the role of women in Spanish society - the main audience for TV series. The lady next door washes clothes 5 times a week and at any moment during the day I can look out of the window and see at least one lady cleaning her balcony. They do that every single day! I mean, seriously, how dirty can things get in one day? And the majority of them are middle aged women, so there are no small children who make things dirty all the time! Women around here in general really seem to have no ambition to do more with their lives than watch the kids and clean the house from top to bottom once a day, with a stolen hour of some silly telenovela here and there and a run of the mill historical or romantic novel (like El tiempo entre costuras) before bed. To these kinds of women the main character of El tiempo entre costuras would probably count as "active" although she basically behaves like the eternal victim who stumbles from one problem to the next. And well, the rest of the TV audience is part of the next generation that is completely broken here - teenagers with the attention span of an average youtube video and anyone not educated enough to find work in other countries: http://politica.elpais.com/politica/201 ... 62946.html If that's the target audience then one can't really expect anything more than mexican style evil twin brother writing and bad acting.
Ah, Spain ...! I'll be quite glad when I finally finish my Iberian audio SC! I've been really tempted to switch to podcasts, but those are actually too easy for me *sigh*.