Area Adelphia Customers’ Ears Tortured With Spanish Language
It seems that some L.A. area Adelphia cable subscribers are UP IN ARMS over a TECHNICAL SNAFU that resulted in Desperate Housewives being broadcast with the Español audio track! ¡AYE CARUMBA! For some reason this teeny inconvenience got straight to the City Council’s desk within days, probably while you drove over the same goddamn pothole everyday. I suspect that just beneath the surface of the complaints is not a little xenophobia, something all too symbolic about a beloved show staring 4 White ladies (OK, 3 plus one white-washed) living in Anytown U.S.A. being drowned out by that damned Spanish racket. Dropping the audio out, if anything, lent some superficial intrigue to the tired plotting.
The kicker is that if you want some real seedy night time soap action, not that tame DisneyABC stuff, you need to embrace the Latino culture and their night time soaps. No clumsy pseudo-artistic bullshit gets in the way of a juicy plotline. This stuff makes “Laguna Beach” look like “The Waltons.” Even if your Spanish is limited to value menu speak, you’ll get the jist of what’s going on. The action comes in broad strokes with musical cues and extreme facial expressions. There’s a great one that just ended called LA MADRASTRA (The STEPMOTHER). (These series actually have a finite run.) The plot is your basic mother wrongly accused of a murder, goes to jail for life, the father, who is unsure of her innocence, raises their kids saying their mother’s dead, then she gets out of jail after 20 years for good behavior, comes back into the father’s life as a stranger, they fall in love again, she becomes her own kids’ stepmother, and then she must decide whether or not to reveal to the kids that she’s their mother. Now that’s a goddamn soap opera. Plus, there’s a character called El Pulpo, which of course translates to “The Squid.” And then there’s this guy on the left, that keeps turning up. He goes by Bruno, The Metrosexual. How can you NOT watch a show with this guy in it, playing it straight?
