italian tv drama

There's only one or two home-grown drama-serials on Italian TV, and they're mostly in the Bouquet of Barbed Wire or Peak-Practice style. Usually the protagonists are languid but intense city women of immense sexual sophistication torn between careers as senior consultant psychotherapists and their roles as classic Italian mothers, bringing up darling fat little Italian bambinos in the grand Italian tradition. As any fule kno, there is never time to do both of these things properly and thus the heroine usually commits suicide.

movies on italian tv

Italian TV does faithfully screen all the latest Hollywood movies, in fact they tend to come on TV here several months before you would ever see them in England, which is nice. Too bad they're all dubbed into Italian though. Romebuddy concedes though that if you've learnt enough of the language to be able to follow an entire film in Italian, then you didn't come to Italy to spend your time watching TV - You'll have better things to do...

Around midnight, when Italian children are pehaps finally in bed, the kid's channel Super 3, in common with most of the other small independent stations starts showing appalling B movies from the 1970's that you've never heard of. Sometimes you'll get lucky and they'll screen something quite good - they did a short season of French films a while back, but usually it's pretty appalling. In fact usually it's 'Valdez is Coming', an old Burt Lancaster spaghetti western which was quite good in 1972, and not bad seen just once again in 1999, but for crying out loud, this old dog pops up somewhere in Italian television every two months!! - They must have a thing about it here. If you are a movie buff though, particularly for rare forgotten 70s and 80's movies, Italian daytime or wee-small-hours TV on the smaller stations is a good time to pick up some of those little classics you thought you'd never see again, if at all. Stuff like 'You're a Big Boy Now, Francis Ford Coppola's first mainstream feature film, or 'Thief', Michael Mann's early crimeflick outing, with James Caan as the protagonist of the title. Just remember the dialogue soundtrack will be in Italian though, so life ain't perfect yet…

nature shows

Even Italian nature programs are made to fit the studio discussion format -Italian nature programs rarely stay on topic, dealing with one type of animal or one sort of plant as we are used to seeing in England - Instead, they are a hotchpotch of library films bought in from British or American sources, and cobbled together into a selection box of assorted flavours of animal. They show these sequences in fifteen or twenty minute segments, after each of which, get this, the camera pulls back to show two blokes standing in the studio discussing what they've just seen! After this, the studio audience chips in. There's never any solid new footage dealing in depth with one subject. It's just yak, yak, yak, yak, yak.
Talk is cheap you see.
Cheap to film, and there's no need to pay a studio audience of hopefuls all clamouring for their fifteen minutes of fame. Just bus 'em in, film 'em yakking, and bus 'em out again, sweep the stage, change the backdrops, and then bus in a new crowd of backsides to yak on the seats about something else for the next show.
That's Italian television folks!

more about italian tv...

General TV Overview
Telejournalism
Commercials
Primetime
Kid's TV

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