Dubbing? Why is it so awful?

A few weeks ago, I binge watched Secrets We Keep on Netflix. The series got pretty good reviews, and I like a good mystery (and a good binge watch), so I tuned in. The premise was reasonably interesting: the disappearance of the Filipino nanny of a super-rich Copenhagen family. And the questions it raised about the exploitation of the nanny cadre, the secret lives of early-adolescent boys, and the life-

styles of the uber-rich were provocative enough. (Talk about house porn: the two key families lived in unimaginablly super-designed and curated modern splendor. Of course, the only rooms that held any warmth or personality, any indication that a real person lived there, were those where the nannies lived.)

Despite the pretty rave-ish reviews I saw, I thought the plot was largely meh. But my big problem with the show was the dubbing.

Why is it that the dubbed voices always sound so fake and unreal? It really doesn't bother me that the lip movements may be a little off. It's that the voices never seem to match what you'd expect to come out of the mouth of the actor being dubbed. And the acting always seems just awful. 

I'd prefer subtitles any old day, even though you have to pay more attention and can't get lost in Sudoku or doomscrolling. You really have to look at the screen and follow along with the non-bouncing non-ball.

It isn't just Secrets We Keeped. 

Earlier this year, it was Just One Look, a Polish series based on a Harlan Coben novel. As with Secrets, the plot was interesting enough, as was the depiction of middle-class Polish life and Polish policing. But the dubbing drove me to distraction!

Dubbing always sounds to me like the "acting" in Clutch Cargo, or one of the other cheesy cartoon action shows of yesteryear. 

How is it that the voices of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Yogi Bear sound real, while the voices of human cartoon characters are always so stilted and fake? Ditto for dubbed shows with real humans. Just awful.

The worst case of dubbing I remember was from my wayback.

Over New Year's 1989-1990, my husband and I were in Berlin to see The Wall fall. One day, after an exhausting visit to East Berlin, when you still had to go through Checkpoint Charlie, we got back to our (West Berlin) hotel late afternoon and just collapsed. For some reason, I told Jim that I could really go for an episode of The Streets of San Francisco. In an unbelievably weird bit of timing, Jim turned the TV on and what to our wondering eyes did appear but an episode of Die Strassen von San Francisco.

It was a truly excellent espisode - the one in which Rick Nelson plays a washed up rock star turned murdering pimp - and one we were familiar enough with that we didn't actually need the subtitles to follow the plot. (My husband did have some German, but it was scientific not conversational, so he didn't know the words for key things like flute-player and teen prostitution ring.) 

Anyway, the dubbing was beyond outrageously bad, probably made all the more so in that we were familiar with the voices of stars Karl Malden and Michael Douglas, not to mention Rick Nelson, whose California-dude, still vaguely adenoidal voice we'd been hearing since he was Ricky Nelson on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. 

So, dubbing: yech!

Fast forward a few years, and I had a business meeting in Amsterdam with my company's Dutch partners. When we were out to dinner, I asked them how they had acquired such wonderful English, right down to perfect accents, the idiomatic Americanisms, and the latest slang. They told me that, unlike American TV shows in Germany, American TV series were subtitled, not dubbed. So they could actually hear how Americans spoke. (At the time, they were picking up cop slang from NYPD Blue. So they knew what skells were.)

Another advantage of subtitling over dubbing!

Not sure what I'm going to do when something else I want to watch turns out to be dubbed. Turn the sound off and the closed captioning on? Maybe. All I know is that dubbing is just plain awful. And it'll no doubt get worse once AI gets a hold of it. 

Sigh...

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Image source: Rotten Tomatoes