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The US Version Sucks!
Why are US versions of international TV shows and movies so lackluster?
The US has a long history of taking TV shows and movies made elsewhere and remaking them for a US audience. Even when the original version was in English or there’s a very good set of subtitles or an English-language dubbed version, there will be an American version made. In my experience, the US version is nearly always inferior in quality to the original foreign version. At first, I thought this was merely a quirk of my own personality, getting caught up in being a fan of foreign media and experiencing the joy of discovering shows and movies most of the people I knew had not experienced. As my media consumption grew and it became easier to get non-US content by easy and legal means, I began to analyze what it was I was seeing in my comparison between the US and elsewhere.
The first thing I learned was that many foreign shows and movies were slower-paced than the US version of the same content. For TV, what might have played out over 2–3 episodes in the original version tended to happen in the first episode of the US version, often with entire scenes eliminated. I assumed this played into the US notion of getting to the point, but it left out a lot of the storytelling of the original version. In the US version, characters often tended to be introduced sooner than we got to meet them in the original version…
