Look Ma, His Lips Don’t Move

I’m not a big TV watcher, but there are some shows I enjoy following. In this day and age of global technology and online viewing, I never considered the possibility that I wouldn’t be able to watch my shows. The internet’s the same everywhere, right? Wrong! The station websites still have those alluring “View Full Episode” tabs, but now when I click them, there’s a really aggravating error message. “Sorry. It looks like you’re outside the US. Since you’ve left the States, you’ve abandoned the right to have anything constant in life, even something as simple as a TV show. Our service is not available in your area.”

As my Spanish is getting better and my desire for American media is getting stronger, one might ask why I don’t suck it up and watch the shows in Spanish. I could. Most of them are on local channels at convenient times. But it’s really not the same. 

I took for granted how much the actors’ voices are part of their characters. You change one, you change both. Would Gregory Peck ever play Atticus Finch using a high squeaky voice with a theta? Absolutely not. Yet, there he is on an afternoon special of To Kill a Mockingbird, telling his kids, “Eboo Radley es una persona muy esthpethial. No le molestes, entiendes Escout?”

It wouldn’t be so bad if there were a variety of voices available. But the qualifications for being a voice-over actor in Spain must be ridiculous because there are only four voices on TV. Ever. The voice of the slutty cheerleader on one show is also the voice of Belle in Beauty and the Beast. The guy who did the voice for Gregory Peck also voiced Ferb in Phineas and Ferb, as well as saying the lines of the villain in James Bond movies.

What’s really complicated is when there’s more than four characters in a scene. Some of the characters have the same voice, leaving you to go, “Hey, who said that?” This is particularly confusing if you’re just barely holding onto the plot line and any person you think is the bad guy gets killed in five minutes.

So for a variety of reasons, watching American TV in Spanish is unsatisfying. While I’m not a couch potato, there are times when I need to watch something mindless to let my brain idle. I guess that’s why the Spanish invented telenovelas.