"Who's Josh Groban? Kill yourself!"

One of the many ways in which living in Kazakhstan is a bit of a paradox: I don’t have running water in my home, but I do have satellite television. And while no form of entertainment can possibly make up for missing the current season of Mad Men, it’s a nice amenity. Mostly, if I choose to watch TV, I watch it on my computer—thanks to the kids in Shymkent, I now have a bunch of new stuff, including several episodes of Glee, which I have been burning through at an alarming rate—but hanging out with my host siblings, especially over school holidays, involves a lot of television. Here are some important facts I’ve gleaned from prolonged exposure to Kazakhstani TV:

1. Zach Braff has sold his soul to the devil. That’s the only explanation for why, in addition to being on American television 36/7 (36, you know, because of that one network that has programming from parallel universes), Scrubs is on Russian MTV all the time when I flip through the channels here. And it’s not even the episodes from way back, when Scrubs was kind of good (or at least tolerable)—these are the ones where Zach Braff grew stubble and apparently finally got together with Elliott, which caused her to affix some kind of shiny, impenetrable shield of make-up to her face and attempt to escape him by starring in terrible Lifetime original movies (which is really an oxymoron). This is what I assume happened, anyway—since it’s all dubbed over in Russian, it’s kind of hard to tell what’s going on. I can’t really figure out the logic of what shows make it onto TV over here—there’s some newer, pretty good stuff, like Ugly Betty, and then there are super-old and inexplicable choices, like Hercules and Andromeda (Kevin Sorbo, like Enrique Inglesias, apparently does much better in Kazakhstan). I keep hoping that having Hercules means they’ll also air Xena at some point, but so far this wish has gone unfulfilled.

2. Kazakhstan is where bad American movies go when they die. All those movies you forgot existed, because they bombed so utterly that even their creators swore, on pain of execution by a Hollywood death squad, never again to mention their names? Those movies you’re not even in danger of accidentally catching part of on TV, because no self-respecting network will air them? All those movies are here. Meet Dave, Drillbit Taylor, The Love Guru, The Spirit, Catwoman, several horrible Christian Slater movies I’ve never even heard of—I’ve seen a number of American movies here you couldn’t have paid me to sit through in the States. In Russian, though, they’re weirdly fascinating, and at the beginning of my time here, I was homesick enough that any glimpse of Americana—even the absolute worst of it—was comforting. Now that I’ve loaded up my hard drive with movies I actually want to watch, though, I hope to minimize my contact with Christan Slater for awhile (unless THT decides to air Heathers, which—much like the chances of them airing the Xena episode where Lucy Lawless feeds strawberries to Marc Anthony while Natalie Merchant’s“Carnival” plays in the background—is highly improbable.)

3. Cartoons are awesome, in any language. I have discovered—or maybe just decided to admit publicly—that I have pretty much exactly the same taste in entertainment as a 12-year-old boy. Which is sweet, since I live with a 12-year-old boy, but awkward, because I also live with a 15-year-old girl, who seems pretty nonplussed when I choose to watch Clone High over Project Runway. (Oh yes, they have Clone High, a fact I discovered on November 22, which is a little weird, since the show stars a clone of JFK and features a diner called “The Grassy Knoll.” Coincidence? Or is Kazakhstan a key part of the Kennedy conspiracy...?) The best network here, in my opinion, is definitely 2x2, which is a lot like Adult Swim—including the black and white bumps, King of the Hill, The Oblongs, Futurama, and Home Movies. I have not seen some of the weirder stuff on yet—I don’t think Aqua Teen Hunger Force would make even a mild amount of sense in Kazakhstan, but Metalocalypse might appeal to a post-Soviet sensibility. The humor doesn’t always translate—if you watched King of the Hill here, for instance, you would think Boomhauer is a mute, since they don’t even attempt to dub his lines, and the Texas accents don’t so much come through when attempted in Russian. You can still sort of hear them, though, since they don’t actually erase the original track: they just dub over it, so you can still hear (faintly) the English dialogue. It makes it a little easier for me to catch what’s going on—I get the beginning and the end of every other sentence, and make up everything in between.

4. Russian TV is like American TV, only…Russian. The whole dub-over thing is kind of a taxing way to watch television, so sometimes I prefer to watch the straight-up Russian shows, where there’s no hope of me understanding the dialogue and I can sort of zone out and pretend the whole thing is an absurdist art film. Sitcoms here are like sitcoms everywhere: zany, family-oriented antics accompanied by laugh tracks, where you don’t really have to pay that much attention to get the gist of what’s going on. My host family’s favorite—"Papa and Daughters”—is about pretty much exactly what you’d guess: five daughters and their father’s attempts to manage their various dramas and mishaps (although there’s also a mother on the show—I’m not really sure why she doesn’t make it into the title). There’s another one about two video game-playing stoners that’s pretty hilarious, and a "Little Russia" skit show (with the same logo design and set-up as Little Britain). A lot of the sitcoms here appear to be blantant rip-offs of American shows—there’s a Russian version of Married With Children that I can understand perfectly, because the characters and plotlines are pretty much exactly the same as in the original. There’s another that seems pretty close to Everybody Loves Raymond, but my host family seems to hate it as much as everyone I know in the States hates Everybody Loves Raymond, so I’ve never watched it long enough to confirm this.

Like in the States, reality television is big here. There’s this epic show called Dom 2 that’s on seven times a week, and appears to be about absolutely nothing. It looks to me a lot like the British Big Brother, where people are filmed just sitting, laying, or sleeping around, with no editing or attempts to make the material in the least bit interesting. My sitemate Tes, who has watched the show more than me and actually did some research into it, says it started out as a contest, where couples were competing to live in the house they were all building together. But the show has been on for five years now, and everyone is still just hanging out—and people still love it. I would think this was weird, but then I remember that there was more than one season of Flavor of Love, and that I watched more than one season of Flavor of Love, and I realize I probably can’t judge anyone for their reality TV choices.

5. Jesus loves you…even in Kazakhstan. On my first day with my new host family, they graciously asked if I’d like to watch English television. I said yes, of course, thinking that maybe I’d lucked out and would have access to CNN or BBC. So my host brother showed me the three English channels—two of which were filled with shouting, sweating, Southern-accented televangelists, and the third with an Australian park ranger puppet singing a song about all the happy children in the world who had made Jesus their best friend by being born again. I had a brief, Truman Show kind of moment, where I thought perhaps I hadn’t left East Tennessee at all and the entire country of Kazakhstan had been constructed as part of someone’s elaborate plan to totally eff with me, but then I remembered that NBC aired the Left Behind movie several times when I was living in Turkey, and the world is just crazy all over. If televangelical television seems absurd in the States, where the only people I ever knew who watched it with real interest were my friends and me, at 3 a.m. (due to some very poor life choices, I still get occasional automated phone calls from a faith healer trying to sell me Miracle Manna), it’s beyond bizarre here in Kazakhstan. First of all, most people don’t speak English well enough to understand any of it, and even if they did, I sort of doubt a hysterical, Muslim-hating old white man in a bad suit or a stuffed bear that sings endless, tinny rounds of “Jesus Loves You” (for only $19.99, you guys!) is going to convey a Christian message of peace and love to them. America and Australia, however, are not the only ones sending out Jesus-y waves—there are also several Chinese and Korean channels that seem to have pretty much the same aim, with huge revivals and frequent appeals for cash.

I’ll do a blog post about the holidays once I’ve recovered from the sugar-and-vodka coma that my New Year’s Eve celebrations are sure to induce. Until then, enjoy the last, fleeting hours of 2009!