This article is a preview from the Spring 2020 edition of New Humanist
It was early November 2014, and I was trying to find a good date to have some friends over on a Saturday night. The email thread where I had posed this question to the group had already spiralled to unreadable proportions, as different people tried to share their availability before I noticed that a couple of them had a very specific logistical issue: “We’re free any of those evenings, but we’ll have to leave at 8.30 in order to be home in time to watch The Bridge.”
This was rare – my friends didn’t usually fit their social plans around their TV-viewing schedule, let alone leave a party early to sit in front of a Danish-Swedish crime drama airing its third season on BBC Four. I had enjoyed the earlier series of The Bridge myself, bingeing the episodes with my family at Christmas like we would with any other box set, but I hadn’t realised that it had become appointment viewing like this, with fans gathering on social media to post along in real time. This was my first inkling that subtitled TV was on the way to becoming a staple part of our mainstream pop culture diet.
Films and TV series in languages other than English have long had a reputation in the Anglophone world for being “artsy” and “highbrow”. A boyfriend I had at university took me to see a film in French on one of our early dates; it was as clear a statement of the identity he was cultivating as what he wore or how he spoke. I understood perfectly, having spent my teenage years in a town where the 12-screen multiplex in an industrial estate on the outskirts was the only place to see any cinema at all.
While critics and film buffs have always been interested in watching productions from other countries and cultures, viewing subtitles merely as a helpful aid to understanding, the wider audience for these films and shows has always been assumed to be small. But in the last five years, something fundamental has shifted in the way subtitled entertainment is perceived, especially in television. In short, enjoying a programme in another language is no longer a niche pursuit. Subtitles have gone mainstream.
This change has a lot to do with the global rise of streaming as a means of distribution for television. As of 2019, there were over 500 million active subscriptions to TV streaming services around the world, with about 30 per cent of those being to Netflix and the rest with companies like Hulu and Amazon. That’s about half of the entire market for paid-for television, with streaming now equalling traditional satellite and cable services.
A lot of the focus on these streaming services in recent years has been on the original content that they invest in as a way of attracting new subscribers, especially since these shows have started challenging for high-profile awards. But while productions like The Crown, The Handmaid’s Tale and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel receive most of the coverage, these prestigious programmes are only a tiny fraction of what is actually available to watch on these streaming services.
The bulk of the TV you can stream on Netflix and the like is licensed from other providers. Often it’s shows from major networks like the BBC that are bought in to bump up the catalogue, but there’s always a fair smattering of bizarre smaller productions available. Getting hold of TV shows that have already been around for a few years and making them available to stream is far cheaper than making dozens of new programmes from scratch.
Since these streaming services operate globally, they also have the challenge of managing different licenses for all the places their subscribers are based. But plenty of border crossing occurs, thanks to multi-territory deals. This is where subtitled TV has come in: the US rebroadcast rights for a show made in a much smaller market and with dialogue in a language other than English are much cheaper than the rights to, say, Friends.
Where once you might have had to subscribe to an obscure cable package to receive foreign language television (or, in the case of one bilingual family I knew growing up, actually have a second satellite dish from Germany on the roof of your house), once it’s on a streaming service like Netflix, it is as easy to access as those headline-grabbing prestige programmes. The technological barrier has disappeared.
With the internet-enabled proliferation of streaming TV came an explosion in new writing about television. Pop culture sites like the AV Club and Vulture popularised a new style of criticism that helped viewers navigate the mass of programmes now available to them, with regular episode-by-episode recaps and recommendations. Quickly, a US and UK audience emerged for the subtitled shows appearing on streaming sites as viewers tried them out and became hooked.
The algorithmic recommendations provided by a service like Netflix make good use of these subtitled shows, too. If you like the telenovela-inspired American drama Jane the Virgin, it might recommend you a Korean drama like Eulachacha Waikiki. If you enjoyed Game of Thrones, it would push you towards the Turkish epic Magnificent Century. If you binged Mad Men in a single weekend then the Spanish period drama Cable Girls is probably for you.
It’s difficult to get exact viewing figures for these programmes, because the streaming platforms don’t tend to release them, but just from the cultural cachet they have acquired, it’s not unreasonable to assume that millions are watching shows like the chilled out Japanese reality series Terrace House or the drug cartel drama Narcos.
People have shed their hang-ups about subtitles – or maybe they were mostly in my head to begin with. I think some of this has to do with the generation below mine, which grew up on the internet and expect their Snapchats and TikToks to have captions on them as a matter of course. To a cohort used to seeing videos captioned on social media, subtitles are just another tool for understanding.
The writer Fatima Bhutto addresses the seismic cultural shift that the rise of subtitled television has occasioned in her latest book, New Kings of the World: Dispatches from Bollywood, Dizi, and K-Pop. American pop culture used to rule the world, she writes, with teens everywhere craving blue jeans and mimicking the accents from their favourite shows. Now, “new cultural industries have flattened the playing field,” she explains. “When the Urdu version of Turkey’s explosively popular television show Magnificent Century aired in the early 2010s, Karachi’s streets would empty and shops that stayed open late through the night would pull their shutters half down.”
The balance of power has shifted. Suddenly, because of the internet, major American networks are remaking TV shows from countries like Denmark, Korea and Turkey – importing ideas from places where US pop culture used to be a major export. But the originals remain incredibly popular too. It’s estimated that over 200 million people worldwide have seen Magnificent Century, and a huge proportion of them will have been reading subtitles as they watched.
It’s only recently that I have come to realise why I really enjoy subtitled TV now. It’s partly because it gives me access to culture and stories I wouldn’t encounter otherwise, but that’s not all of it. It’s because of how it forces me to watch the screen properly, rather than fiddling with my phone or doing something else. I can’t scroll through Instagram and still keep a grasp on what’s happening, because I can’t follow the plot without reading the subtitles. And so programmes like Terrace House and Cable Girls have helped me to (partially) kick my phone addiction and be more intentional about what I watch. I’ve rediscovered the fundamental truth about TV: whatever language it is in, it’s much, much better when you actually watch it.
