Swedish Television
Thursday, October 24, 2002
We don't usually watch TV in the U.S. -- we find that it can take up a lot of time that is better spent doing other things. But we have less "other things" to do here, so we have been watching a bit more TV here.
There are three free broadcast channels. Two (channels 1 and 2) are Swedish Television -- they are public stations, and don't have commercials. The third (channel 4) is a commercial station, so it does have commercials, but less than we do in the U.S.
Much of the programming is in Swedish, especially on channels 1 and 2. However, a fair amount of the programming is in English -- either British or American. These have Swedish subtitles, but aren't dubbed [I heard somewhere that this may be a legal requirement that they are subtitled and not dubbed, except for children's shows], so we can watch them just fine. Most of the American shows are probably from at least a couple years ago. Some older than that. Some of them we had never heard of. And since we don't usually watch TV in the U.S., we haven't seen most of the shows.
Channels 1 and 2 go off the air for part of the day. They come back on sometime in the afternoon. So there isn't as much selection during the day. By "selection", we mean "shows in English" -- at any given time, we are lucky to have an English show on one of the three stations. I think I may have seen English on two stations once or twice.
There is frequently some kind of Swedish "host" introducing the shows throughout the evening. At least I assume they are introducing the shows -- they are speaking in Swedish so they could be saying just about anything.
There seems to be a lot of repetition -- especially of Swedish shows. Sometimes we see the same show on a few times per week. (I'm thinking of the show "Farmen", which is apparently some kind of "reality TV" show where they throw a bunch of people on a farm to work. We haven't figured out the appeal...maybe if we understood Swedish...)
Swedes seem to like game shows -- there are quite a few of them. Some are Swedish versions of American shows -- like Jeopardy and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. They also have a show like American Gladiators...sort of a game show I guess. Other shows are original -- there is one that seems to involve guessing the name of songs and singers and things from a short clip of the music video.
There aren't nearly as many commercials here as in the U.S. -- maybe one commercial break (or sometimes none) during a half hour show. During a movie, the first hour can pass without seeing any commercials. [In fact, I just saw an article the other day which said that a Swedish film director is about to file a lawsuit with TV4 for "degrading" his movie by putting a commercial in the middle of it.] The commercials themselves are almost always in Swedish. We can figure some of them out -- some are pretty funny. Others aren't so funny after we figure them out.
There are usually movies on each evening during the weekend. They are almost always American movies, again in English with Swedish subtitles. Some are good, some aren't. They usually start at 9:00 PM. But then at 10:00 they break for the news, and then the movie starts again at 10:30 or so.
Sweden (and Europe in general) has a bit of a reputation for being more sexually open than the U.S. We can see some evidence for this on TV. Since most of the shows are American, you see exactly what you would see in the U.S. We don't watch the Swedish shows, since we don't understand them. But flipping through the channels we don't see anything worse than the U.S. There have been a couple commercials which show naked men from the rear. But the main difference is that in the U.S. they would censor the movies before showing them on TV, whereas here they don't.
There is also a "Text TV" system. Even with the normal broadcast stations, you can press a button on the remote to get text related to that station. You can enter numbers to see different pages of text. It's all in Swedish, of course, but we've been able to at least figure out the kinds of things that are there. They have news and sports, stock quotes, the TV schedule (we've actually been able to use that), and even some kind of chat system (not quite sure how that works). They also have information on some of the upcoming shows and movies. There also appears to be information related to the shows that are on -- for example, a food show might have the recipes which they made that day. (I'm not entirely sure about that...but I think that's the kind of thing that's on there.)
So, like most things here, it's somewhat the same, and somewhat different than what we are used to. It would be nice if we could get some news in English, but I guess that's what the Internet is for.