Americans Hate Tingle / Live-Action TV

• Due to differences in attitudes as opposed to the source material of Super Sentai, Power Rangers has some elements that don't gel with American audiences:
  • The general rule is that Super Sentai works best while being silly, and Power Rangers works best when being serious. For this reason, the serious Chouriki Sentai Ohranger caused Super Sentai's popularity to take a bit of a dive; but the silly Gekisou Sentai Carranger managed to Win Back the Crowd.^note The theory that Ohranger almost ended Sentai has been proven to be false. It was in fact Chikyuu Sentai Fiveman that almost got Sentai cancelled and Choujin Sentai Jetman was originally intended to be the final season. Inversely, when Ohranger was adapted into Power Rangers Zeo, it was and is a season that is well-regarded among Power Rangers fans; while when Carranger was adapted into Power Rangers Turbo, ratings got so low that the creators decided to wrap up the series on a lower budget the following year. But Power Rangers in Space, at the time the darkest and most serious season, was so popular that Power Rangers got renewed and is still going.
  • Villains also get different treatment. Kyūkyū Sentai GoGoV had villainess Denus, who is well-regarded in Sentai fandom. When it was adapted into Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue, her equivalent, Vypra, was hated by fans, thanks in no small part to the X-Pac Heat leveled against Jennifer Yen. It got to the point where Linkara, in his review for his History of Power Rangers series, all but cheered when Vypra was absorbed into Queen Bansheera later in the season.
  • Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger is well regarded among both Sentai and Ranger fans, while its American counterpart Super Megaforce is loathed by Ranger fans. (However, that’s more due to Super Megaforce being viewed as a poor quality show with little respect for the earlier Power Rangers series, rather than that the elements of Gokaiger were unpopular in America).
  • Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger was not well received because it seemed to push aside its rather larger Ranger cast to focus on the Red Ranger. Meanwhile, Power Rangers Dino Charge was very well received by Americans, having had a few years to work out the problems of the series and having had the first exclusive villain in ages. It also worked to shoot its own footage. Even more so in Korea, where Kyoryuger was so popular, that a brand new series was commissioned with new villains and zords just to continue it.
  • Samurai Sentai Shinkenger and Power Rangers Samurai are a bizarre case... Americans and Japanese alike love Shinkenger... but the Americans despise Samurai despite (or because of) the very similar plot. The Power Rangers series is typically given a pass because it was rushed to production and getting it over with was part of the problem with Super Megaforce.
  • Ressha Sentai ToQger was directly confirmed as being skipped for a Power Rangers adaptation because of cultural differences: specifically, the Rail Enthusiast culture is very heavy in Japan but highly niche at best in the US, due to various historical reasons. As such, an entire season themed around trains and railway stations was considered a much riskier bet than more "generically" cool themes like dinosaurs or ninjas.
  • Among American fans, Uchuu Sentai Kyuranger is getting a nice following. Much of the love is owed to it being Super Sentai's first Space Opera plot, which has been the basis for two very successful Power Rangers adaptations. It's helped that this is also the first time that Super Sentai production has worked with Power Rangers production and that, despite the team starting at nine members, each of them seems unique, fleshed out, and fun. Until Hasbro took over the franchise, Bandai was apparently looking to skip Dobutsu Sentai Zyuohger in favor of adapting Kyuranger for the next season of Power Rangers, since Zyuohger had a mixed reception among US Sentai and Ranger fans; and the tie-in toyline may be more appealing with a motif of space travel instead of blocky animals. Elements of Kyuranger were eventually incorporated into Power Rangers Cosmic Fury.
• Kamen Rider:
  • Fans in the West tend to dismiss Wataru Kurenai (and, to a lesser extent, Ryotaro Nogami) for being 'weak' and 'unmanly' compared to many of the other protagonists in the franchise.
  • Japanese fans of Kamen Rider 555 don't seem to mind Masato Kusaka. American fans almost universally despise him for being a Jerkass Devil in Plain Sight.
• While the practice of adapting manga series to live-action medium is nothing new in Japan, movies and TV shows based on manga series tends to get this reaction from anime fans in North America. Even went far as blaming this to the company that licensed the shows overseas rather than production companies behind them. (Hence, the "Netflix Adaptation" memes).
• When MTV's American remake of Skins was cancelled and overall declared a critical and ratings flop, the creators invoked this, claiming that Skins was a "global phenomenon" that just wasn't catching on to Americans for whatever reason. But in fact, the original British show does have a strong cult following in the U.S., comparable to its popularity in other non-European countries, as the US remake was criticized for beings too Bowdlerized compared to the original UK version, even with MTV giving it a TV-MA rating.
• M*A*S*H is very much not liked in South Korea. This is based on the view that it portrays Korea as a war-torn, third-world country inhabited by prostitutes, criminals, and primitive morons. Many Koreans seem to see M*A*S*H as a symbol of everything that is wrong with Western portrayals of their country, which is now a first-world democracy and economic powerhouse.
• Jeopardy! is one of the most popular game show franchises in America. The original version ran from 1964 to 1975, and the current version has been on the air continuously since 1984, usually paired with Wheel of Fortune. However, unlike Wheel and most other American game shows, foreign versions of Jeopardy! are far fewer in number, and far less successful across the board. Sweden would be an exception to that, where a version of "Jeopardy" was a big hit for many years.
• Everybody thought Dallas couldn't miss in Japan, but it did — the only country in the world that could show it at the time where it did.
• Although the ITV show Upstairs Downstairs was very popular in the United States, two early characters – Sarah the housemaid and Thomas the chauffeur – didn't share in the general plaudits. American viewers, who were at the time generally unaware of the "plucky little Cockney sparrow" trope but very aware of the "blackmail is sociopathic" trope, did not share British audiences' appreciation of the two, to put it mildly. Even today when shown in repeats, some American stations leave out most or all of the Sarah and Thomas episodes.
• Love/Hate is tremendously popular in in its native Ireland, with one episode enjoying an unheard of 53% audience share. In Britain when it began airing on Channel 5, it attracted middling at best viewership figures.
• Sesame Street:
  • While Sesame Street is considered one of the most popular children's shows of all time in the U.S. and has spawned many international co-productions (with local material and dubbed American bits), the success of the exports varies. In particular, the United Kingdom never really embraced the show, mainly because of a bizarre 1971 incident where the head of children's programming at the BBC rejected the show in a very public way, accusing it of "authoritarianism", "indoctrination" and "middle-class attitudes". Eventually it aired on ITV and Channel 4 and gained a modest following, along with the universally kid-friendly Play With Me Sesame and direct-to-DVD programs. However, Furchester Hotel on CBeebies did very well.
  • The urban American feel that kept it from being successful in the U.K. also made it hard for it to catch on in Canada. While the show was eventually re-worked as Canadian Sesame Street (with locally-produced segments interspersed with American episodes) and Sesame Park (an entirely local co-production), the original series was considered too grungy (particularly Oscar the Grouch, though his presence in later Canadian commercials suggests that perspective has changed). Canada has also historically had its own relatively large and domestically popular children's television presence, spawning such icons as Mr. Dressup and the Friendly Giant.
  • In India, it was given a local version named "Gali Gali Simsim", (Street Street Simsim, a literal translation), which sounds more or less close to Sesame Street, the show was mildly popular among young audiences, only Elmo, Grover and the duo of Bert and Ernie retained their names and some screen time, others were either created from scratch. The show ran for five seasons.
  • Sesame Street was popular in Japan up until the long-running dub of the original American show was canceled in favor of a new, locally-produced program — the changes weren't well received by fans of the original, who believe it fails to localize the show's style into something that appeals to Japanese audiences. However, because of their kawaisa aspects, the characters are quite popular among Japanese young adults, and as a result, Sesame Street is better known as a trendy brand than as a program with educational value.
• The TV miniseries Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter, about five friends in World War II, was such a hit (albeit NOT uncontroversial) in Germany, that it was turned into a theatrical movie, Generation War, and distributed abroad. However, it had difficulties finding an audience outside of Germany, given that it's a movie that portrays Wehrmacht officers in a sympathetic light. It was particularly unpopular in Poland, as the series depicts the Polish resistance as anti-Semitic slobs.
• This type of reaction was the main problem Venezuelan network RCTV faced when they tried to sell their soap Por Estas Calles to the international market. In the country, the soap was so popular and the characters so loved, it was extended and extended until it finally ended after three years.^note  In fact, when the original scriptwriter tried to kill a popular Anti-Hero character and end the soap after the standard six months, the network fired him. But the reason the soap was so popular was because it was a Roman à Clef of the current state of the country; when broadcast in other countries, they lacked the key, and since the romance plot was very slow and the overall atmosphere so bleak, the viewers did not care. Every country that broadcast it cancelled it after mere weeks.
• House of Anubis is widely disliked in the Benelux countries. The main reason is that the show it was based on, Het Huis Anubis, had already lots of fans there before Studio 100 (which only publishes works in the Benelux due to their limited budget) decided to give the rights to Nickelodeon to make their own version of the show. When Nickelodeon announced to those countries that Nickelodeon was going to air it, many looked forward to the show in the hope that it would be Het Huis Anubis they all knew and loved, but what they ended up getting was a show with a completely different cast of characters, plotlines etc. and many disliked the (in their eyes) Flanderization and Cultural Translation (or de-Flanderization, as it were) that was done.
• Seinfeld failed in Germany while being successful in most of the world. Main reasons are Executive Meddling (the stand-up segments were left out; the dubbing had some weaknesses), Hype Aversion and the fact that the kind of humor just did not catch on well. In its initial run, it only lasted one season.
• Many international Trekkies dislike the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Omega Glory" because of how intensely it uses the Eagleland trope, culminating with Kirk reading the U.S. Constitution aloud. Not that there aren't a significant number of Americans who share the same view.
• MTV has been a phenomenon everywhere in the world, with the exception of France, where it is niche at best. This mainly has to do with the RTL group having already launched a music channel in France under the name of M6, which fulfilled the role that MTV already had and that launched on 1 March 1987, while MTV only launched there on 1 August 1987. Add in that US imported cable channels generally have limited access to the French audience (you already need a quite expensive contract to watch Nickelodeon or Disney Channel in that region; Nickelodeon also can't use the "Nick" name in France, as it otherwise sounds like a similar vulgar word in France) while M6 is available even in the cheapest cable contracts and you understand why MTV never had success in that region. Not only that, MCM is more or less seen as a French version of MTV and is actually more popular than MTV France.
  • Most MTV Reality TV series don't do well outside of Anglophone countries, leading to most international MTVs actually airing music videos (a feat now considered impossible on the original American MTV), or airing acquired scripted programming, and some like the Italian and Russian feed airing Anime.
• There are plenty of Canadian television dramas that have aired in the U.S., but the first one that was actually considered a hit in America is ironically the least-viewed of them all. This was also averted for Schitt's Creek, which is just as big as it is in the US as it is in Canada.
• Canadian Kid Com Some Assembly Required got an OK reception in Canada, but got trashed hard by American audiences who first heard of the show through Netflix. It doesn't help that their previous live-action kids' show, Richie Rich, got just as bad a reception, if not worse.
• Degrassi Junior High was huge in its native Canada in the late 1980s/early 1990s due to its very honest and upfront portrayal of teenagers and teenage problems, and had good reception in the United States and Australia (especially Australia). However, it didn't last long enough in the UK to make much of an impact there thanks to a combination of this and Executive Meddling; the BBC relegated half of the first season to a later timeslot due to viewer complaints and never aired the later seasons.
• Empire was a massive hit in the United States when it debuted, but flopped in international sales, even in Canada, where most American hits succeed (though being Screwed by the Network in Canada may have played a role). There have been a number of claims to why, but most comments say that subject matter (about the cutthroat hip-hop industry) doesn't really appeal to international audiences.
• Phone-in Game Shows may be a polarizing concept in many parts of the world, but in Flanders, they are universally considered to be a blatant case of fraud, only meant to extort money from unsuspecting viewers, since an episode of the Flemish investigative journalism series Basta exposed the story to everyone. The two television networks that aired them refused to do so afterwards because they feared a public backlash.
• Survivor was an absolute phenomenon in the United States in the early 2000s and widely credited for sparking the reality television craze there. Even two decades since its debut, it's still one of CBS's primetime hits and started getting very popular in Australia, whose own version is a favorite with superfans in the US. However, the show never caught on in the UK, despite that country's massive market for reality TV. The two British Survivor seasons both flopped, and there was a two decade gap between the original series and the BBC reboot. For the most part, Britain sees Big Brother as the originator of the "social chess" reality television series instead, causing Survivor to stand out more for its aesthetic gimmicks than anything else.
• The American version of Big Brother, meanwhile, premiered to much hype but was quickly criticized as boring, largely because of Values Dissonance affecting the voting. While British viewers kept around the most controversial contestants for their entertainment value, American viewers were shocked by their behavior and voted them out first, leaving a cast of fairly bland housemates. It was only in the second season, when Big Brother US changed the rules to be more like Survivor (i.e. the housemates vote each other out), that it found its footing.
• The Ultra Series suffers very badly from this almost everywhere outside of Japan. In its homeland, Ultraman is a massive pop culture icon, a Cash-Cow Franchise, and an influence on many creators. Elsewhere, it's viewed as idiotic and cliché crap, with lots of negative comparisons to Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers and Mystery Science Theater 3000 films. A lot of this is due to the Values Dissonance, especially with monster design, but also because of Tsuburaya Productions' limited distribution caused by a long-running legal dispute with the Thai company that started the problem, Chaiyo Productions, over the international rights to the franchise.
  • Nowhere near as bad as mainstream perception of the franchise, but the Ultra Series isn't as big in the western Toku fandom as other major franchises like Kamen Rider, Godzilla, or Super Sentai. It still has lots of fans amongst western Toku lovers, but usually at second-rate, with Gamera often getting more attention. But in Japan, the Ultra Series is enormous, even dwarfing the others in sheer popularity at times (particularly Gamera, which though not obscure is not quite as popular in Japan when compared to the rest). This alone is why Tsuburaya is doing their best to make their shows accessible in the western hemisphere, and it works.
• When The Noddy Shop was aired in the United Kingdom, the show attracted a lot of flak because of it being a re-packed version of a beloved British series and having what they considered terrible acting and music.
  • This also applies to any other Importation Expansion show based off a British show, since British fans will often think it's inferior to the show its adapting. Besides The Noddy Shop, the most noteworthy example is Salty's Lighthouse, to the point where it's a Running Gag in the Thomas & Friends fandom to deny that the show exists because of it being a Macekre of TUGS that mixed up clips from episodes that were unrelated to each other, changed character names and censored some scenes.
• While Barney & Friends was mega popular in North America, in other parts of the world it wasn't as big. It's notable in the United Kingdom and Australia, due to those markets already being crammed with various local preschool shows. In the case of Australia, they already had a similar show, Here's Humphrey, that pre-dated Barney by almost 30 years by the time it premiered and had an established viewerbase.
  • The series performed even worse in Brazil, mainly because its idealistic and saccharine tone didn't gel with locals (even children), who are generally used to harsher themes presented in telenovelas and other media (domestic or imported).
• While Chernobyl received universal acclaim around the world for its depiction of the Chernobyl disaster, its reception in Russia was more mixed. Many nationalists and the pro-Putin state media openly lambasted the series as American propaganda for depicting the Soviet government as corrupt and incompetent – prioritizing its ideology over facts — which contributed to the disaster and bungled the response. On the other hand, many survivors and responders, including retired General Nikolai Tarakanov, have praised the series for its startling accuracy and heroic depiction of the emergency response crew.
• Sex and the City was considered to be very daring and groundbreaking for addressing issues of sex and relationships that other shows hadn't discussed before, especially from a female standpoint. Other viewers in the US watched it because they felt it was hot and saucy. In Europe the show was appreciated more for its comedy and camp value, because the fact that the main cast always have sex without removing their bras or with sheets covering up their genitals still comes across as very prudish for a show with the word ''sex'' in the title.
• Tokusatsu is considered something of an art and a longtime tradition of both film and television in Japan. In most other parts of the world though (especially in places like Eastern Europe, where exposure was nonexistent until after the Cold War), it's usually ridiculed as "bad", "primitive", "cheap", or "lazy" and often called "Power Rangers type shit that should be abandoned for Hollywood CGI". Values Dissonance is strongly at play here due to the importance of tradition in Japan and that the priority of Toku is artistic interpretation, not realism; not to mention that Japanese movies and TV shows are usually made on comparatively lower budgets than American ones. Ironically, current Toku series do employ CGI, but only in parts where some moves would be impossible to be replicated by a suit actor.
• The Netflix series Emily in Paris, about an American woman employed by a French marketing firm, was well-received in the US but flopped in France, where critics and viewers felt that it relied too much on French stereotypes and a Mighty American storyline.
• According to Vince Gilligan, Breaking Bad (despite nigh-universal acclaim in its home country) suffered a bit in its transition to international markets, due to the show's premise hinging on a fear that doesn't really exist outside of America. Specifically, the American healthcare system is mostly privatized and profit-driven (with government-provided healthcare being far less extensive next to the agencies available in most other developed nations), and medical bills are known to be extremely high. Hence, Walt getting diagnosed with cancer is notable in part because the treatment is likely to cost tens of thousands of dollars even with insurance, requiring him to either beg for money from his own colleagues or go into meth cooking to avoid his family facing financial ruin. In any nation with a universal health care system, this depiction makes much less sense, as medical bankruptcy is much less common, meaning that the show's premise tends to require explaining or create confusion. The only international adaptation, Metástasis, had to be set in Colombia in order to make the plot work.
• While Moon Knight (2022) was well-received in most of the world, it met a furious backlash in Turkey, due to a line in the first episode in which Arthur Harrow makes reference to The Armenian Genocide as one of the historical tragedies that the Egyptian deity Ammit could have prevented had she been free. The official position of the Turkish government, echoed throughout the media and education system, is that the Armenian genocide was a hoax cooked up to smear Turkey, and that the Ottoman Empire's massacres of Armenians were a legitimate response to a Russian-backed uprising. As such, Turkish users attempted to review-bomb the show, calling it anti-Turkish propaganda.
• Mr. Bean:
  • The show has traditionally done poorly in Germany and the US (although, weirdly, Britain mistakenly believes it to be wildly popular in those countries, usually as a disparaging comment on the "simple tastes" of Germans and Americans when it comes to comedy) — the general consensus is that Mr. Bean's antics are less funny and more offputtingly bizarre, and since those countries have little concept of a culturally-enforced Stiff Upper Lip, they find it strange that the bystanders in the sketches put up with Bean's behavior. Consequently it's hard for Germans and Americans to understand why the series is so popular in its native country or the other major countries where it is popular, such as Japan, Canada, France and various East European nations. Since the show's initial American run was on HBO, in an era when PBS was usually the home for imported British comedies, it never really got exposed to an audience that might've embraced it.
  • Australians also tend to dislike Mr. Bean, regarding him as a bumbling idiot whose ineptitude and strange thought processes are groan-inducing rather than humorous. This was even acknowledged on an episode of the edutainment Panel Show QI, with Bill Bailey noting that he heard an Australian disparaging Mr. Bean as "somebody who wouldn't last ten minutes in the bush" during a trip to Australia.
• Narcos and Narcos: Mexico have both received rather lackluster if not outright negative receptions in Colombia and Mexico, mainly for their perceived glorification of drug traffickers. For countries that have suffered massively from decades-long narcoterrorism, this is a sensitive topic.
• The Crown: While UK critics were broadly positive in their reviews of the first three seasons, Season 4 was met with a much more mixed reception, and Season 5 was met with an extremely negative reaction. This was largely the result of a combination of these seasons being more openly critical of the monarchy, combined with them being the point where they started depicting Princess Diana (who is a huge Sacred Cow among much of the UK population), and in the case of Season 5, the death of Queen Elizabeth II a few months prior making the press overwhelmingly hostile to anything that might even remotely be seen as a criticism of the monarchy.
• Rise of Empires: Ottoman:
  • It is a vocal minority, but many Greeks think the series is Turkish propaganda, believing the historical inaccuracies and the Lighter and Softer portrait of Mehmet II (at least in their opinion) to be an affront against Greek suffering and culture.
  • Romanian viewers showed a similar reaction towards the 2nd season despite the inclusion of Romanian actors.
• US nighttime soaps have generally done well in the UK. Their daytime counterparts not so much... except for Sunset Beach on Channel 5.
• Xuxa Meneghel was a Brazilian pop star whose children's program, Xou da Xuxa (or Xuxa's Show) became massive in her native country during the late 1980s-early 1990s. Soon, her show started airing and being translated from Portuguese to Spanish in Spanish speaking countries as well as the United States on Univision. Come 1993, it was decided to bring her and her show to the United States in English. Despite the push and even a doll her, Xuxa's popularity in Brazil and the Spanish speaking world couldn't translate well in America. Her American show, simply titled Xuxa, only lasted for a single 65-episode season in syndication. One likely factor for why Xuxa failed to catch on in America was her poor grasp of English, which was often broken. Xuxa also struggled with singing live in English so she had to resort to lip syncing. Another problem is that on her Brazilian program, Xuxa was highly sexualized and dressed and danced provocatively. Naturally, on her American produced show, Xuxa had to tone it down and dress less sexy.

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