I have two pet peeves about Japanese TV (apart from the most obvious, which is that I don't understand anything that's going on). Speficially, they relate to Japanese 'variety shows', which is what I call any loud, obnoxious show that has a bunch of generic-looking 'cute' people in a big room together, and lots of ugly visual clutter on the screen.
The first pet peeve is the way we can never see any story or piece of footage, without also seeing the 'cute' people reacting to them. Usually in the corner of the screen there is a little box with a person's face in it, looking horrified, laughing, or surprised.
You are not allowed to make up your own mind whether something is interesting or funny; the talents will very loudly interject throughout every segment with wild, overblown laughter or shocked 'ehhhhhhhh!'s. It's even less subtle than watching a cheesy 80s sitcom with a laugh track after every line of dialogue.
The second pet peeve is the portrayal of Japanese girls on TV. They're frightful. Now it's true that in Australia, most actresses are expected to be quite good-looking, well-made-up, and fashionable. But on Japanese TV, they look and sound like parodies of human beings. They have no personality - or rather, they all have the same personality.
Most Japanese 'talent' girls are virtually indistinguishable - they all have the exact same squeaky 'ehhhh' voice, cutesy 'charming' attitude, over-treated hair, the exact same facial expressions when pretending to look shocked, etc.
Mind you, the men are just as bad, in a different way.
(By the way, I have the TV on right now. There are no fewer than FIVE 'cute people' at the bottom of the screen, reacting while they broadcast footage of fireworks from around Japan. BUT, they've been playing the same thing for at least twenty minutes. There's only so long you can enjoy watching five people gasp and say 'wooooah!' and 'sugoii!' at fireworks on TV. (In my case, my tolerance is about 3 seconds.))
No comments:
Post a Comment