There really is no rhyme or reason to predicting or understanding which bits of the American monoculture will turn up in Buenos Aires, or when. Luckily, One Sorry Blog maintains a Buenos Aires desk to keep readers apprised of developments in this gripping yet oft-overlooked area of cultural studies.
On Sunday, Clare and I went to a birthday party for the tattoo artist who our most recent houseguest flew 8000 miles to hire. There we met a guy called Bruno who was into 24, Heroes, Dr. House, the original Office and Ali G. He’d got hip to all this stuff online, and never watches TV. But Heroes debuted in Argentina last week, 24 is half a season behind and pretty much any standard American television series can be seen on TV in Buenos Aires. My boss here is a lifetime viewer of Melrose, 90210, Dawson’s Creek and a million other programs that I would have been hard-pressed to identify if I saw on television before I started hanging out with Clare, a tried and true Network TV Slut. (Incidentally, One Sorry Blog looks forward to having Clare’s younger sister, Little Julie, a Network TV Slut in her own right, begin writing an eponymous column very soon.)
Last night, I read an article online about all the work that goes into publishing the point spreads for the first 32 games of the NCAA tournament just 45 minutes after the field of 65 teams has been announced. Needless to say, given that not one but a lot of folks are willing to go to such lengths, the NCAA tournament is a huge deal in the U.S. I’d even guess that more people who don’t give two hoots have a stake in the NCAA tournament than the Super Bowl. Yet try to find a college basketball game on television in Argentina before the Final Four and you’ll be disappointed. There are one or two tape-delayed NBA games each shown twice per week, all involving the Argentines Manu Ginobili and Andrés Nocioni or Gilbert Arenas, whose great-grandfather was Cuban.
Yet last night, right here in Buenos Aires, where commercials during the Super Bowl are not the real Super Bowl commercials but instead 30-second explanations of the absurd rules of American football, one of the two ESPN channels was devoted to… wait for it… Arena Football!
