J.J. Abrams is my master now

One of the glorious things about living abroad is that the stated goal of improving your language skills is the get-out-of-sloth-free card that allows you to sit around all day watching television and not feel bad about it. Factor in three additional notes—1) most of Russia takes off work from December 31 through January 12, my workplace included, so there’s nowhere I have to be all day; 2) the temperature has been steadily and rapidly dropping, to the point that it’s sometimes colder the next day than it was the night before, which I didn’t think was allowed; and 3) every time I step outside, I seem to discover a new weapons shop—and you’ll see that forces beyond my control have conspired to effectively to keep me indoors. I’ve used the free time well, though, by putting in a truly phenomenal amount of, um, intensive listening practice over the past week. In fact, I just immersed myself in my target linguistic environment for three hours! I’m so proud of myself. Four gold stars.

When it comes to television, I’m none too discriminating to begin with. To know if I will watch a show, a good rule of thumb is to ask, 1) Is it on? 2) Am I awake? If yes, pass the remote. However, when I was in Russia two years ago, I was seriously put off from the tube by my host father, who followed a different set of criteria when selecting shows, something to the effect of, Does this show feature a) impalement, b) dismemberment, оr c) any-other-kind-of-violence-ment? Since that was my impression of Russian TV going in, I was worried that I would be limited to the news, which issues from the mouths of the anchors at speeds that have been known to upend trees and capsize sailing vessels. So, imagine my joy when I turned on the TV last Saturday morning and caught this classic snippet of dialogue:

У меня есть одна идея—ты хочешь? (I have an idea—do you want to hear it?)
Да! (Yes!)
Отлично! Вот мой план. (Excellent! Here is my plan.)

Yes. I had found the Russian dub of “Scooby Doo.”

So, as it turns out, my criteria for watching television in Russian is even lower than my criteria in the U.S., namely 1) Can I understand what’s going on? and 2) Is anyone being impaled? If yes and no, pass the remote, which doesn’t work, sigh, get up and manually flick through the channels, tire of the amount of effort this requires, and just keep it on MTV. This is the only explanation I have for the amount of “Next” that I have watched. I make no apologies for my unabashed adulation of “Pimp My Ride,” which is made even more, um, pimpin’ by the surreality of watching it in Russia, in Russian. (And no, I can’t understand the dub, but no, that has not limited my understanding of the essential themes of the show.)

My parents will be happy to note that there are a number of things to enjoy on Russian television when they’ve run out of rides to pimp. Chief among these is the Russian sitcom, which eerily resembles the American sitcom, specifically the American sitcom circa 1984-1992. My new favorite standby is “Кто в доме хозяин?”—“Who in the house is the boss?” (Sidenote: I’m a huge fan of the way the addition of the extra words turns the title from a declarative statement—“Who’s the Boss”—into something of a philosophical query. I wonder, good sir, if you could tell me, who is in charge of this domicile? I don’t know, Socrates, I guess I’ll have to keep watching the show.) Out of everything I’ve seen, this show best fulfills criteria 1 and 2 above: the ratio of comprehensible-dialogue-to-impalement is astoundingly high. It is far and away superior in that respect to “Счастливы вместе”—“Happy Together,” which is the Russian knockoff of “Married with Children.” “Happy Together” has a similar impalement rating, but I can’t understand a word of it, despite the fact that a full nine-tenths of the content of the show is communicated entirely through mugging for the camera. In fact, the dubious honor of “Show That Sounds The Least Like Gibberish To Me” belongs to, of all things, the Russian dub of “Lost.” Yes. That’s right. “Lost” is the most comprehensible thing on television. Think about that, the next time you think culture shock is nothing. I understand about 80% of “Lost” in Russian, which is, I'm pretty sure, about 50% more of the show than most people understand in English. (In Capitalist America, “Lost” understands you!) The honor is dubious because for this to be the case, the writing must be astounding monosyllabic. Should I ever need to tell someone to Run! Run!, I’m totally set. “Lost”’s comprehensible-dialogue-to-impalement rating takes a hit on the latter end, though; while no one except a polar bear (yeah, I know, and yet I understand this) has yet been impaled in the episodes I’ve seen, the threat of it remains much higher than on, say, “Can you point me to the leader of this residential building,” or whatever they’re calling it.

Pretension alert: I’m about to take a detour into “Modern Jackass” territory and make some statements that I don’t have the actual knowledge to back up. The Russian penchant for ‘80s sitcoms makes some sense, I think, if you make the gross generalization that Russia is, in many ways, 20-30 years behind the U.S., particularly when it comes to attitudes towards women and families. While I can, with not a small amount of pride, state that I have never actually watched the original “Who’s the Boss” and “Married with Children,” my understanding is that part of the popularity these shows enjoyed was due to their new portrayals of women, specifically, working women who were the heads of their households and who had no time for housework and women who were vocally and crassly unhappy with their families. That was new in the U.S. in the ‘80s. While women in the USSR had a very different experience than American women, obviously, women who make more money than men and who head their households are only now starting to become a more visible part of society in Russia, and the strain is starting to show. Maybe if more Russian judges watched “Кто в доме хозяин?” they wouldn’t be quite so quick to declare sexual harassment the cornerstone of the country’s population growth. Who knew that Tony Danza was the international women’s rights movement’s greatest weapon? No wonder we lost the ERA.

It is also possible that the Russians' attachment to Eurovision has permanently retarded their cultural growth. This can only bode good things for my blog when Russia hosts Eurovision later this year.

Now excuse me, I have to go watch “Pinky and the Brain.” Don’t worry, I’m going back to work on Monday. Narf!