What Americans Never See

By Richard Zoglin

The heroine of Superlady truly lives up to her name. A single mother who works in a supermarket, she struggles to support four children while coping with a horde of distractions: a crazy ex-husband who thinks he is being attacked by cosmic rays, a girlfriend who shows up on her doorstep (with kids) to take refuge from a violent lover, a government bureaucracy that takes away her housing allowance the minute she earns a little extra income. This made- for-TV movie has more authentic feminist spirit than Murphy Brown, more realism and heart than The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, and more plainspoken charm than any TV movie seen in the U.S. in years.

But American audiences will probably never see it. It was made in Denmark.

International TV programming is the great terra incognita for American viewers. The occasional British mini-series or Australian soap opera makes its way to these shores, via PBS or cable, and news sometimes filters back about the latest hit on Japanese TV or those funny foreign versions of Wheel of Fortune. But for most of the U.S. audience, TV in the non-English-speaking world remains trapped in the twilight zone.

I got a quick but intense tour of that mystery land when I served as one of six international jurors at this month's Banff Television Festival -- an annual get-together for producers, broadcasters and other TV people from around the globe, held in the picturesque Canadian Rockies. Eight days of screening 130 programs, debating their merits and awarding prizes in 10 categories produced three chief surprises. First, after grueling 11-hour days of virtually nonstop TV viewing, it was still possible to retreat to the hotel room and turn on David Letterman without going bonkers. Second, despite the obvious differences in national and cultural background among the jurors (who came from Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Germany and Japan, as well as the U.S.), there was a surprising degree of consensus on which shows were prizeworthy and which were zappable. Third, U.S. viewers are missing out on a lot of good television.

American TV, to be sure, remains pre-eminent in some areas. Weekly comedy and dramatic series, for example, are still largely a U.S. specialty. NBC'S I'll Fly Away was voted best continuing series, beating out a lackluster group of entries dominated by American shows (The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, Northern Exposure). Watching an episode of Cheers with a greatly amused band of international viewers, moreover, was a reminder that despite its grinding familiarity, the American sitcom at its best has achieved a level of craftsmanship unmatched anywhere in the world.

In most other categories, however, American shows look like slick assembly- line goods compared with the richness and handcrafted diversity of the best international fare. Made-for-TV movies from Europe, for example, are far more adventurous in style and subject matter than their true-crime-of-the-week U.S. counterparts. Actors are less glamorous, directors more imaginative, characters and themes more subtly explored.

Superlady, which won the made-for-TV-movie prize, is visually unsophisticated (shot on videotape by director Vibeke Gad), but it has a matter-of-fact delicacy that seems utterly beyond the scope of ham-handed Hollywood. A daughter's hearing impairment, for example, is just a fact of life, not an occasion for sentiment or sententiousness. Le Diable au Corps, a remake of the Raymond Radiguet novel about a teenager's affair with a married woman (a co-production of France, Spain and Switzerland), has the exquisite period look of an Impressionist painting yet musters more emotion and eroticism than countless literary "classics" that have been stuffed and mounted by TV. Even smaller films like The Widower, a Belgian-Dutch adaptation of a Georges Simenon novel about the suicide of a prostitute, seem fresh and deeply felt.

Short dramas -- a genre that has all but disappeared in America -- are just as diverse and interesting. The Dark Side, from Spain, spends nearly an hour with just two characters -- an admitted political torturer and his interrogator -- in a stark and harrowing exploration of human cruelty. It won the prize over a very different but equally fine work from Sweden: Dear Hunter, the wry tale of a rock star and her manager who, stranded in the backwoods by a snowstorm, try to modernize the life of a stolid grouse hunter who puts them up for a night.

Some of the most creative work around the world is being done in children's television. American dramatic shows for kids tend to be either treacly or patronizing. There is nothing quite like The Children's Detective Agency, a delightfully droll (and surprisingly adult) series from Sweden about a band of youngsters who see themselves as junior Philip Marlowes. Nor could one imagine a U.S. network turning out Une Nuit a l'Ecole, a captivating French-Canadian short film that takes a simple premise -- two children trapped in a school building on the first night of Christmas vacation -- and invests it with the force and conviction of epic drama.

The finest documentary of the festival came from Germany: The Last Farewell, an extraordinarily moving account of the last days and thoughts of a woman dying of leukemia. The patient's startling frankness and the filmmakers' ability to probe without seeming to exploit make the program a revelatory, and in the end quite stirring, document.

But overall, the best nonfiction programming comes from Britain. In science documentaries like The Elements (a primer on the periodic table) and Molecules with Sunglasses (about the discovery of a new form of carbon), subjects both basic and complex are transformed by sheer directorial imagination. The British knack for mordant, understated wit is on brilliant display in Masters of the Canvas, a hilariously deadpan account of painter Peter Blake's obsession with a masked wrestler named Kendo Nagasaki. Just as witty and original is Dostoevsky's Travels, which follows the novelist's great-grandson, a tram driver from St. Petersburg, on a trek through Western Europe, retracing the trip his ancestor made 130 years earlier. (The younger Dostoevsky's more worldly goal: to buy a Mercedes.)

These British programs may eventually show up on U.S. TV screens. But foreign-language fare, no matter how good and accessible, has an almost insurmountable problem: subtitles are a virtual taboo on American TV. It is a terrible shame. At a time when programmers are searching for unusual fare to attract bored viewers, would it be too outlandish for one network to devote a couple of hours on a slow summer evening to a prizewinning TV movie from Europe? With cable channels scrounging to recycle the most obscure American shows from the '50s and '60s, has no one thought of picking up a few choice morsels from overseas? In a cable universe that will soon grow to 100 or 150 channels of programming, where is the International Channel?