It strikes me as s deliberate marketing tactic. Instead of investing in creating nice, acclaimed dramas, they put that money into relatively more garbage shows that cater to mass audiences and try to find shortcuts to repurpose that content and repackage it to “kill two birds with one stone” and cater to the indie niche with it.
But the tactic doesn’t work, and now my Netflix menus are filled with super frustrating noise of these foreign shows, often which you can’t tell are foreign until you press play. It has made the platform nearly unusable to me.
The crazy thing is that I love a lot of foreign movies and shows. Amour, You Are the Apple of my Eye, Burning are some of my favorite films. But the things Netflix is pushing on me are more like network-level crap dramas with a clear attempt to make you feel like they are fancy merely by being foreign.
Would agree their dubbing is universally horrendous. Even for something well reviewed like Dark.
For me it’s very nearly at a level of canceling the service. Their original content hasn’t been compelling for me personally in many years, and now it feels deliberately manipulative.
Black Spot, Dark, Nobel, etc. British shows like Peaky Blinders, Doc Martin, Bodyguard, Sherlock, The Inbetweeners, and especially Broad Church.
Before netflix I would never have given these shows a chance and indeed I cannot think of a time I have watched a foreign show before this besides Luther. Netflix has done a great job of surfacing these at least to me. No idea if I represent the normal TV viewer.
One fascinating thing that I appreciate about foreign tv is that the main actors for many of them don't look like models like in the US but just regular people, flaws and all.