What TV are you drinking those days?
This is a consultation you’ve probably had a lot, and others, five months after the pandemic started. The videos are closed. The theater is on hold. So there’s not much else to do. I can’t help but watch Korean dramas (I just finished Crash Landing On You) and gossip girl revivals on Netflix.
Our blog covers everyone, so we were curious to know what emissions are obsessed with this pandemic other people from other countries. We asked the hounds of nine countries to locate the property. – Malaka Gharib
In Argentina, other people think about existential issues. What is the meaning of life? What is time? And it’s not just about the pandemic. Is it because almost everyone watches the Netflix Dark series?
The suspense exhibition from Germany, which is recently taking place in the city of Winden, explores time and similar philosophical problems. Members of 4 families seek to discover why the youth mysteriously disappeared as they headed to the afterlife and the future.
“I could have a lot of debates [around these existential topics] thanks to this show,” says Maria Pirsch, a 30-year-old Dark fan and producer and photographer. She studied physics for a time and is interested in the idea of time travel.
Released in 2017, Dark is now in its third season. The newest album released on June 27 in Argentina, and some enthusiasts were so excited that they saw it at four in the morning when it premiered. “I don’t want to sleep, I want answers,” someone wrote on Twitter.
Julia Pujol, a pathology lab technician, admits that when season 3 came out, she saw two episodes and, after a little sleep, looked at the other six in a row. And because many enthusiasts stayed at home from the pandemic, he discovered that quarantine was a smart excuse to review the first two seasons.
Dark is available in the U.S. on Netflix.
Anita Pouchard Serra is a photojournalist in Argentina.
Ramayan, a series founded on Hindu mythology, tells the story of Lord Ram as he goes into exile, fights the demon king Ravan who kidnapped his wife and, despite everything, returns to his hometown, Ayodhya, to be crowned king.
This is the plot of an iconic exhibition that first aired in 1987, when televisions were not unusual in India and neighbors made a pilgrimage to the nearest space to see.
During the pandemic, fans demanded its return and state-run TV channel Doordarshan National (DD National) obliged.
DD National began re-telecasting Ramayan on March 28. That week, the channel’s viewership jumped to 545 million from about 9 million in January.
Social media is now full of nostalgic messages from other people reliving memories of their years of training, many with their own children this time. Ramayan is now broadcasting on Disney-owned Hotstar.
Sushmita Pathak is a manufacturer of NPR in Mumbai.
In Colombia, soap opera addicts are frantically looking at their favorite, Passion of Gavilanes, who returned 17 years after its release.
The TV network Caracol says it is re-running the Colombian telenovela—the second-most watched show in its history — during lockdown at its audience’s request, given that recordings of current shows are on pause due to the pandemic.
In 188 episodes, Gavilanes Passion tells the story of 3 brothers seeking to avenge the suicide of their sister, Libya Kings. She’s dating a rich married man named Bernardo Elizondo and she’s become pregnant. Then he died. She went to her circle of relatives to tell them she was going to give birth. And after Elizondo’s wife humiliated her, she jumped off a bridge.
The Reyes brothers descend into Elizondo space posing as masons. His plan is to seduce Elizondo’s 3 daughters as a eulogy for his sister’s death.
Maria Fernanda Martínez, 24, says she is watching the news with her mother of the lockout through “pure and undeniable nostalgia”.
Hilda Corenas Vergara, 57, who saw the news in her heyday, enjoys reliving the delight with her circle of relatives of the confinement. “There’s no boring episode,” he told NPR.
But not everyone feels the same way. Some Twitter users say the situation is classist, because Gabriela, the wife of the late Elizondo, punishes her rich daughters for falling in love with working-class men. Others say it glorifies the physical and verbal violence opposed to women.
Gavilanes Passion recently tops national TV charts and is the most watched screen on Colombian Netflix. It must also be streamed in Spanish on Netflix USA.
Sophie Foggin is a journalist in Medellin, Colombia, covering politics, human rights, history and justice in Latin America.
One of the most-watched TV shows in Kenya during the pandemic is Maria, a 30-minute Kenyan drama that revolves around the life of Luwi, the youngest son of a wealthy family. Luwi falls in love with gorgeous—and poor—Maria. Only he has another lover, and when she finds out, things get complicated.
Even before the arrival of COVID-19, Swahili drama was one of the most popular television screens in the country, according to GeoPoll’s Audience Measurement Report, which measures audiences. In fact, when actor Brian Ogana, who plays Luwi, visited a number one school in Kibera in March, the screams and screams of enthusiastic young people may slightly involve his enthusiasm.
And other people love Yasmin Said, the actress who plays Maria. “You have haunted my circle of relatives! Starting at 6 p.m., this family circle team rushes to prepare you not to miss the action. Congratulations,” one user wrote on Twitter.
New episodes continue to air throughout the pandemic. The half-hour show is broadcast from Monday to Friday at 7:30 p.m., with reruns on Saturday from 4-6 p.m. There are about 150 episodes to date.
The show has been one of Julia Anyango’s favorite ways to pass time since the pandemic began. A teacher by profession, living in the Korogocho slums in Nairobi, she’s had to stop work due to school closures.
Her favorite character is Maria: “It provides disorder to the rich circle of relatives because it comes from a ghetto life,” Says Anyango.
Some of the episodes may be on YouTube.
Thomas Bwire is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Habari Kibra, a news center that focuses on Kibera community reports.
The new frantic clock in Israel is Tehran, a mystery of Israeli spies about Israel’s secret war with its arch-enemy Iran. A young Mossad agent leaves for her first project to her hometown of Tehran to Israel to pull out an Iranian nuclear reactor, however, the project goes wrong and ends up falling in love with an Iranian activist who opposes the regime.
The transmission is based on real tensions between the Jewish state and the leaders of the Islamic republic. It turns out to be the first popular Israeli TV series about cool Iran. Israel and Iran have hostile relations, and Iran forbids Israelis from surrendering. Then there’s a lot of curiosity.
The Iranian main character is played by Iran-born actor Shervin Alenabi. London-based, he says his participation in the exhibition is debatable in Iran, and that means he would probably not return to the country and would see his circle of relatives because Iran strictly prohibits any interaction with Israel.
The 8-episode screen, with each episode of approximately forty-five minutes, premiered on June 22 on israeli public television channel Kan. The screen is in Hebrew, Farsi and English with Hebrew subtitles.
Daniel Estrin is NPR correspondent in Jerusalem.
China is fascinated by The Bad Kids, a Chinese television mystery that tells the story of 3 young people who to do justice to themselves after accidentally capturing a double homicide on the appearance of a cliff in front of the camera. In their search for truth, young people are involved in revenge and blackmail.
It’s full of thrilling twists and turns: it obscures the ethical limits of your characters and tests your viewers’ compass.
The 12-episode series premiered on the Chinese broadcast platform iQIYI on June 16. And it has won over China’s non-easy audience: it scored 8.9/10 on the review site Douban, notoriously difficult to satisfy. Even People’s Daily, the official Communist Party newspaper, published an article praising the exhibition as “an example of short, high-quality series.”
Chinese dramas tend to favor endless plots (The Story of Yanxi Palace, another popular television series two summers ago, required a serious commitment to all 75 episodes). But most importantly, the exhibition is the introduction of a new age on Chinese television, which presents a trend beyond classic genres such as period plays, dramas from the family circle, and the Chinese-Japanese war.
Amy Cheng is a manufacturer of NPR in Beijing.
The Senegalese television series Infidelles – or “infidel” in French – is full of dramas. In the early minutes of the first episode, the audience engaged a dozen characters and some other entanglements. A wife and husband discuss social media posts, but are temporarily reconciled; a woman entrusts her friend that her boyfriend, her mutual friend, physically abuses her; and two friends pressure a third friend who prefers to use the hijab to dress more provocatively and less studio.
The series, which premiered on July 18 on YouTube and Senegalese television channel SenTV, airs every Wednesday and Friday. And he’s got enthusiasts and detractors.
In the country of 16 million more people, YouTube videos have more than 1.5 million views, but many others prefer to watch them on television while they are broadcast, says Senegalese cultural critic Aboubacar De Cissokho. “People see it on TV so that then on Facebook or WhatsApp they can participate in the reactions that are happening,” he says.
The show has also created controversy. After a character with the same name as the mother of a historic Muslim leader in the country—Mame Diarra—was portrayed in a scene that discussed same-sex relations (which are outlawed in Senegal), a leader of a local conservative nonprofit organization, Jaamra, publicly denounced the name choice.
On the other hand, says Cissokho, the controversy of the episode highlights the controversial LGBT problems in the country. “People are already talking about these problems, however, the debate adapts to a public debate and becomes large when it is presented on television.”
Ricci Shryock is a photographer and freelance journalist in Dakar, Senegal. Follow her on Instagram on @ricci_s.
In Pakistan, the must-see exhibition is a Turkish drama that local media calls “The Muslim Game of Thrones.”
Resurrection: Ertugrul dramatizes the story of the guy who carries his call: the father of the founder of the Ottoguy Empire. It is the last large-scale Muslim empire, which ruled parts of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa for more than six hundred years, collapsing after World War I.
The 5-season series, which first premiered on the Turkish channel TRT 1 in 2014, has drama, heroes and heroines and chaste romance with Muslim characters at its center. That’s key to its popularity in Pakistan, a Muslim-majority country of more than 200 million people, where it’s seen as gripping, wholesome family fare. And it lets Pakistanis indulge in nostalgia for the glories of the Muslim past.
“What moved me most [Etrugrul] was the way it united the entire tribe and shaped the Ottoman Empire,” Muhammad Shahzad Cheema told the local Dawn newspaper. He is so fanatical that he has arranged a statue of Ertugrul’s character from the show to be erected in his Lahore housing network in June.
Prime Minister Imran Khan, a playboy-turned-conservative, is also a fan. He recommended Pakistanis watch the show to connect to their Muslim roots.
The screen is not without criticism. In an dawn editorial, liberal Pervez Hoodbhoy described him as “frankly propagandist” and said that the violence inflicted through Muslim heroes “suggests that the way forward is through the sword.”
Diaa Hadid is NPR correspondent in Islamabad.
When a newborn baby named Zephany Nurse was abducted by his mother’s bedside at a Cape Town hospital in 1997, the case took South Africa. And then the track cooled. That is, until 17 years later, when the nurses’ youngest daughter saw a woman who looked strangely like her at her new high school, and a DNA test showed they were sisters.
The strangest story of Zephany Nurse’s fiction is now the basis of a popular South African Netflix series, Blood and Water. The series showcases the glamour of the nurses’ hitale treating her to Gossip Girl, with the fictional narrative in the context of a Cape Ivy indoor high school where academics return to waterfront mansions and spend weekends sipping cocktails at waterfront hotels.
For South Africans, the exhibition is an escape fantasy, but for a country accustomed to wince through the Western narratives of their stories (think Nelson Mandela in Morgan Freeman’s strange American accessory in Invictus), it’s also a role reversal. “I saw a lot of enthusiasm in Array … in the United States, to see the young black men represented,” said Elle Ama Qamata, the star of the exhibition.
Blood and Water, Netflix’s original African series, airs internationally on the platform since May and has been renewed for a season.
Ryan Lenora Brown is a journalist founded in Johannesburg, South Africa. She writes about women, migration and pop culture.